Must Reads

Before. Miles “Pudge” Halter is done with his safe life at home. His whole life has been one big non-event, and his obsession with famous last words has only made him crave “the Great Perhaps” even more (Francois Rabelais, poet). He heads off to the sometimes crazy and anything-but-boring world of Culver Creek Boarding School, and his life becomes the opposite of safe. Because down the hall is Alaska Young. The gorgeous, clever, funny, sexy, self-destructive, screwed up, and utterly fascinating Alaska Young. She is an event unto herself. She pulls Pudge into her world, launches him into the Great Perhaps, and steals his heart. Then... After. Nothing is ever the same.

When Moira Dreyfuss' parents announce that they're sending her to an all-girls boarding school deep in the Maine woods, Moira isn't fooled. She knows her parents are punishing her; she's been too much trouble since her best friend, Nathan, died―and for a while before that. At the Castle School, isolated from the rest of the world, Moira will be expected to pour her heart out to the odd headmaster, Dr. Prince. But she isn't interested in getting over Nathan's death or befriending her fellow students. On her first night there, Moira hears distant music. On her second, she discovers the lock on her window is broken. On her third, she and her roommate venture outside...and learn that they're not so isolated after all. There's another, very different, Castle School nearby―this one filled with boys whose parents sent them away, too. Moira is convinced that the Castle Schools and the doctors who run them are hiding something. But exploring the schools will force Moira to confront her overwhelming grief―and the real reasons her parents sent her away.

The authors of the “impossible to put down” (The Guardian) thriller Old Country return with a terrifying novel about a wilderness camp for troubled teens that is plagued by mysterious events and disappearances, taking survival and discipline to a frightening extreme. Thirteen-year-old Ben is sent to a remote reform program for troubled teens by a juvenile court judge. But when he arrives at the camp, located on the edge of the vast wilderness of northwestern Montana, he immediately recognizes that there is something off about the counsellors. They’re too friendly and upbeat…yet Ben can tell there’s an undercurrent of menace. As he gets to know the boys in his cabin, he soon discovers that they each have far more going for them than whatever crime landed them there. And each has a different critical skill, one that could help them unearth what is really going on in this place—and how to make it out alive. They are inching ever closer to the truth, and the hidden evil beneath the camp’s surface will make itself known in order to deter them.