Lacey Galbraith

January 11, 2011 The protagonist in Jonathan Rogers’s latest young-adult novel, The Charlatan’s Boy, is Grady, a twelve-year-old orphan who doesn’t “have any idea who I was or where I come from.” He doesn’t even have a last name. For much of his life, Grady has traveled from village to village alongside “full-bloomed scoundrel” Floyd Wendellson. Together they put on a circus-freak-show performance, with Floyd as the showman ringmaster and Grady “The Wild Man of the Feechiefen Swamp.” Dressed in “muskrat and possum hides,” his face covered in mud, Grady pretends to be one of the Feechiefolk, a mythical group of people who live in the swampy “black waters of the Feechiefen.”

November 9, 2010 Hope McDaniels, the star of Kristin O’Donnell Tubb’s latest middle-grade novel, is a thirteen-year-old magician’s assistant. Hope has crawled inside a box to be sawed in half, stood still while knives were thrown her way, and levitated in front of an awed audience. Selling Hope takes place in 1910, during “the world’s first case of mass hysteria,” when the Earth was due to pass through the tail of Halley’s Comet. Tubb will launch the book at Barnes & Noble Booksellers in Brentwood on November 13 at 2 p.m.

April 23, 2010 Autumn Winifred Oliver is eleven years old. She fidgets, speaks her mind, and has a talent for drawing. Her neighbors call her “rascally,” “rampageous,” and “up to no good,” but Autumn can’t help it; she’s restless, and most of all—as her creator, Kristin O’Donnell Tubb, clearly states in the title of this charming debut novel—Autumn Winifred Oliver Does Things Different.