A coming-of-age novel in verse set in 1980s Southern California, about a Persian American girl who rides the waves, falls, and finds her way back to the shore Thirteen-year-old Ava loves to surf and to sing. Singing and reading Rumi poems settle her mild OCD, and catching waves with her best friend, Phoenix, lets her fit in—her olive skin looks tan, not foreign. But then Ava has to spend the summer before ninth grade volunteering at the hospital, to follow in her single mother’s footsteps to bec...
Is there such a thing as too much truth?Though only in year ten, Maggie Paris is a star on the school swimming team. She also has an uncanny, almost magical ability to draw out people’s deepest truths, even when they don’t intend to share them. It’s reached a point where most of her classmates, all except her best friend, now avoid her, and she’s taken to giving herself away every chance she gets to an unavailable – and ungrateful – popular boy from the wrestling team, just to prove she still ex...
Sixteen-year-old Abby Lipman is on track to win the state swim championships and qualify for the Olympic trials when a fainting incident at a swim meet leads to the diagnosis of a deadly heart condition. Now Abby is forced to discover who she is without the one thing that's defined her entire life.
Kate’s father has been pressuring her to be perfect for her whole life, pushing her to be the best swimmer she can be. But when Kate finds her dad cheating on her mum, Kate’s perfect world comes crashing down, and Kate is forced to leave home and the swim team she's been a part of her whole life. Now in a new home and new school, faced with the prospect of starting over, Kate isn't so sure that swimming is what she wants anymore. When she decides to quit, her whole world seems to fall apart. Bu...
Feather Tucker has two wishes: 1)To get her mum healthy again 2) To win the Junior UK swimming championships When Feather comes home on New Year’s Eve to find her mother – one of Britain’s most obese women- in a diabetic coma, she realises something has to be done to save her mum’s life. But when her Mum refuses to co-operate Feather realises that the problems run deeper than just her mum’s unhealthy appetite. Over time, Feather’s mission to help her Mum b...
My Box-Shaped Heart is a powerful story of an unlikely friendship from Rachael Lucas, author of The State of Grace. Holly's mum is a hoarder, and she is fed up with being picked on at school for being weird . . . and having the wrong clothes . . . and sticking out. All she wants is to be invisible. She loves swimming, because in the water everyone is the same. Ed goes to the swimming pool because everything else in his life has changed. In his old life he had money; was on the swim team; kne...
A high school coach invites members of his swimming team to a memorable week of rigorous training that tests their moral fiber as well as their physical stamina.
In Laguna Beach, California, sixteen-year-old Kendra Dimes is preparing for the 2010 USA Surfing Prime West. She’ll be competing this year in honor of her brother, who was a surfer too, but who died from a drug overdose. Kendra has suffered anxiety attacks ever since her brother’s death, and surfing is what’s been helping her heal. Brock Parker is the new bad boy at school; he deals drugs to the high school clientele for his parents, who work for a Mexican drug lord. Though Brock and Ken...
A teenage girl wonders if she’s inherited more than just a heart from her donor in this compulsively readable debut. Seventeen-year-old Chloe had a plan: work hard, get good grades, and attend a top-tier college. But after she collapses during cross-country practice and is told that she needs a new heart, all her careful preparations are laid to waste. Eight months after her transplant, everything is different. Stuck in summer school with the underachievers, all she wants to do now is grab her...
Theo Mackey only remembers one thing for certain about the fire that burned his life down: he lit the match. Sure, it was an accident. But the blaze killed his mom and set his dad on a path to self-destruction. Everything else about that fateful night is full of gaping holes in Theo's mind, for good reason. Maybe it's better that way. As captain of the Ellis Hollow diving team, with straight As and solid friends, he's only one semester away from securing a scholarship and leaving his past behind...