Parenthetical

Martin Maple and his dad live alone on an island. Mr. Maple spends all his time building a mysterious machine that he says will bring hope. When the machine is almost done, he rows off to the mainland to bring back the final piece. He never returns, nor do the vacationers who come to the [...]

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Best friends Kayla and Mishalla are GENs, Genetically Engineered Non-humans. In other words, slaves. Built in tanks from human and animal DNA, designed with special “skets” (skill sets), they are at the bottom of the strictly hierarchical society humans have built on their colony planet Loka. They have no say about where they work, where [...]

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Ambrose is the son of Martin Truax, wealthy and mysterious inventor of the social network Unison. Everyone who’s anyone has a login, and Ambrose’s entire life is devoted to running the company for even bigger profit. Mistletoe has no idea whose daughter she is — she lives with junk dealer Jiri in the impoverished subcanopy [...]

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Anya Balanchine has a lot of responsibilities. As the orphaned oldest daughter of a mafiya boss, with only her bedridden grandmother for a guardian, she is surrogate mother for her brain-damaged older brother Leo and younger sister Natty. She tries to keep all of them out of the family business, but of course she can’t [...]

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Paolo Bacigalupi (Ship Breaker) is interviewed in School Library Journal this month: “Master of Disaster”. He talks about his take on the now-trendy post-apocalyptic genre. Reading the interview I had the unsettling feeling that he stole the kind of thoughts that are churning around in my brain all the time and used them as interview [...]

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Rose’s parents, the heads of the most powerful corporation in the universe, have put her in stasis periodically her whole life. Usually just for a few months, but it adds up — her best friend Xavier, who was born when she was 7, eventually caught up in age and became her boyfriend. But then Rose [...]

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Amy and her parents are frozen cargo aboard a generation ship bound for Centauri-Earth. In 350 years they will be awakened to build humanity’s first colony on a new planet. 300 years into the voyage, the crew — many generations born and raised and died on the ship — are led by a series of [...]

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Kelsa’s beloved father, a scientist and nature-lover who taught her everything she knows about logic and wilderness survival, has just died of cancer. She and her mother don’t see eye-to-eye on anything. All she wants to do is escape, to heal on her own terms. And then Raven shows up — a “First Nations” boy [...]

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Aerin Renning, fugitive from a slave planet, gets an unbelievable chance to attend Academy 7, “the most prestigious school in the universe.” Dane Madousin, son of the Alliance’s top military man, also scores high enough on his entrance exam to attend Academy 7. She is terrified and withdrawn; he has deep-seated anger and a death [...]

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In our near future, a virus wipes out the ability of adult women to carry children to term. Teen pregnancies become revered, trendy, and lucrative. Melody’s adoptive parents have groomed her to be the perfect Surogette who will “bump” for the highest bidders, with whatever genetically perfect stud the wealthy future parents choose. The only [...]

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