young adult Collections and programs

The moment you see a dragon is usually your last…

Since the dragons emerged–along with the scourge that ravaged our lands and people–there’s only one human city that remains standing: Vingard.

But the hellfire from above is nothing compared to the threat from within. For there is no worse fate than being dragon cursed. Slowly and excruciatingly, you’ll be transformed into a mindless beast who destroys everything–and everyone–you love.

Any of us could be tainted. Any of us could be lying. Any of us could be caught and killed by the authorities.

And I’m terrified that I might be next.

There’s only one other person who might suspect my secret. He’s like my shadow, following me wherever I go. Part protector, part tormentor, fully annoying. Sometimes I think I am just one of the million unfathomable secrets he keeps hidden.

Because Lucan definitely knows something.

And if I’m dragon cursed, death might be the only mercy I get.

Celeste Muldoon is alone when the Big One finally hits, because, for the first time ever, her best friend stood her up after school. Nicky and Celeste share a birthday, matching tattoos, an obsession with the upcoming Mars mission, and pretty much everything else. So why did he ghost her on the day she needed him most?

As the quake’s death toll rises and days pass, Nicky and Celeste’s parents fear the worst. But Celeste doesn’t buy it. He couldn’t be dead. Nicky’d spent their senior year selling essays to rich kids and was about to get caught. He’d told Celeste about his plan to vanish, to reinvent himself and escape the disaster he’d created. The quake would be perfect cover.

But she can’t convince anyone that he could still be alive. Only Meo, a mysterious stranger who was somehow mixed up with Nicky, seems to believe, but Celeste has every reason to distrust him—even if her heart races whenever Meo shows up.

When Celeste finds Nicky’s notebook, it sends her and Meo on a quest across the broken city, up the coast through towns sheltering quake refugees, and eventually all the way to Florida, where the mission to Mars is about to lift off.

Twelve months ago, an escape room fire took everything from Steffi Zamekova. In just one hour, she lost it all: her popular blog, her close-knit inner circle, and her memories of the night that killed one of the group’s own… the charismatic (if infuriating) Matt Cesari.

On the anniversary of the bewildering tragedy, Steffi is still desperate to piece together what went wrong. So when she receives an ominous invitation in the mail summoning her to the new escape room across town, she seizes the chance for answers.

Reunited with her former friends, Steffi sees the game as a last chance to uncover the truth behind Matt’s death. But it’s soon clear that each participant has their own cagey reasons for accepting the challenge. And as tensions rise and the players are picked off one by one, it’s a race against the clock for Steffi to uncover their secrets and unlock her own memories before the game’s mastermind ensures that no one escapes the room alive.

The end is near...

Logan and Dakota must prepare for the fight of their lives in order to defeat an enemy more powerful than they've ever faced.

The lives of everyone they love are on the line.  The stakes couldn't be higher.

Will they have what it takes? Or will the cost of victory be too terrible to bear?

Darkest Night is the final book in the riveting Nuclear Dawn post-apocalpytic series.

One cruel night, Meggie's father reads aloud from a book called INKHEART-- and an evil ruler escapes the boundaries of fiction and lands in their living room. Suddenly, Meggie is smack in the middle of the kind of adventure she has only read about in books. Meggie must learn to harness the magic that has conjured this nightmare. For only she can change the course of the story that has changed her life forever.

One year has passed since Sally wed her beloved Jack Skellington and stepped into her role as queen of Halloween Town. Even with her Jack at her side, though, being a ruler isn’t easy, and Sally feels uncertain of her future. Her seams are stretched thin with her royal duties, her newfound family in Dream Town, and a desire to bring citizens from across the Hinterlands together.

Then a simple potion demonstration at Sally’s inaugural Halloween exhibition goes horribly wrong, and things unravel fast: Sally and her new rag doll apprentice, Luna, fall through a mysterious portal, landing in a new realm called Time Town. They discover that someone has tampered with the clock that controls Halloween Town, and Sally cannot return to the present-day version of her home unless she finds the culprit and resets time.

Sally and Luna embark on a journey to unmask the truth, encountering more towns, friends, and foes along the way. But time is ticking, and as Sally fights to save Jack and her hometown, she wonders what kind of future she really wants–and what she must sacrifice to get it.

Heather agrees to a group camping holiday with Dougie and his friends because she's desperate to get closer to him. But when the two of them disturb a pagan burial site above the beach, she becomes certain that they have awoken a malevolent spirit. Something is alive out there in the pitch-black dark, and it is planning to seek deadly revenge.

One year later, Heather knows she was very lucky to escape Black Cairn Point, but she is still waiting for Dougie to wake up from his coma. If he doesn't, how will she prove her sanity—and her innocence?

Everyone knows the Ivies: the most coveted universities in the United States. Far more important are the Ivies. The Ivies at Claflin Academy, that is. Five girls with the same mission: to get into the Ivy League by any means necessary. I would know. I'm one of them. We disrupt class ranks, club leaderships, and academic competitions...among other things. We improve our own odds by decreasing the fortunes of others. Because hyper-elite competitive college admissions is serious business. And in some cases, it's deadly.

Shoshanna Greenberg loves working at Once Upon, her favorite local bookstore. And with her moms fighting at home and her beloved car teetering on the brink of death, the store has become a welcome escape.

When her boss announces a holiday bonus to the person who sells the most books, Shoshanna sees an opportunity to at least fix her car, if none of her other problems. The only person standing in her way? New hire Jake Kaplan.

Jake is an affront to everything Shoshanna stands for. He doesn’t even read! But somehow his sales start to rival hers. Jake may be cute (really cute), and he may be an eligible Jewish single (hard to find south of Atlanta), but he’s also the enemy, and Shoshanna is ready to take him down.

But as the competition intensifies, Jake and Shoshanna grow closer and realize they might be more on the same page than either expects…

When the walls close in, the truth comes out.

When Indy’s life came crashing down, she made a no one could know. To the world, she’s still the same Indy—cool, calm, unshaken. But behind the scenes? It’s chaos.

Her tight-knit crew—Beau, Caroline, and Ava—were once her everything. Now they’re strangers she can’t seem to reach—especially Beau. And the only person she talks to these days is Cody, a skater-boy she used to think was so not her type. Funny how everything changes when your world flips upside down.

And then, as if things couldn’t get weirder, Indy finds herself literally stuck in a school bathroom with Beau. After months of silence, and there’s no escape. If they want out, they’ll have to face the messy truth about what happened between them and find a way back to what they once had. Or maybe even more . . .