When two young twins Samantha and Matthew explore a mysterious cave in the woods behind their home in Mississippi, they find themselves stumbling into a new adventure with a lost princess from another realm. Together they seek a way to return her back to her home but learn that their task will be more dangerous than they thought, as an evil wizard, who plans to make sure the princess remains separated from her home, lurks around them. With no one else to turn to for help the twins know they must find a way to return the princess back to her realm before it's too late...

From Shirley Jackson Award-winning author Carrie Laben comes debut novel A Hawk in the Woods, a tale of twin witches on the lam.

The year is 1962. The family of fourteen-year-old Kevin Collins, caught in white flight, has moved from Beverly, its South Side of Chicago neighborhood, to the city's northern suburbs. The field of Kevin's most formative boyhood adventures was Ryan's Woods, the great South Side forest preserve, mysterious, beautiful, running along the city's western edge a full mile from 83rd Street to 91st. It now serves as the frame for his memories. Memories of a villain enemy, of games hard-fought as wars, of moments of fear or courage, of moments that transcend racial division, and of first love in all the pure strength of its innocence. Memories, still fresh, of best friendships that Kevin now feels will be forever unrecoverable. And memories especially of his greatest friend, Jackie Leonard, whose death at age thirteen has moved Kevin to turn memory into story. KIRKUS REVIEWS www.kirkusreviews.com In this raucous coming-of-age fable, a gang of Catholic schoolboys bonds, fights and absorbs tragicomic life lessons amid an urban arcadia. Kevin Collins is an average tween at Christ the King school on Chicago's southwest side circa 1960, but the titular municipal green space near his house seems nearly as full of mythic adventure as Sherwood Forest. The woods are an idyllic spot for sports, after-school forays and first kisses, though they also harbor more unsettling things: a tree on which a young boy hanged himself; a frightening nude man; the possibility of a violent ambush. Ranging through the forest with Kevin are his band of buddies, including manic prankster Frankie Malone and born-leader Jackie Leonard, a boy of such preternatural athletic talent, courage, empathy and grace that he's nothing short of a two-fisted playground saint. Also prowling about are their hated rivals from Vanderkell public school, led by a psychotic bully named Val Prizer with a mysterious grudge against Kevin, and black kids navigating racial tensions as Chicago's system of neighborhood segregation starts to break down. The author pegs his tale on a loose-jointed, episodic narrative of football and baseball games, aimless jaunts and tremulous encounters between Kevin and his crush, Patty. Much of the book is simply Kevin and his friends hanging out and being boys, a setting rendered with vivid, funny, pitch-perfect atmospherics as the lads razz and wrestle each other, spew profanity, plot moronic japes and ponder the world through a lens of puerile goofiness. (Sample philosophical inquiry: Malone asks Pete if God could eat the entire human race, blood, guts and all, and not be grossed out.) Creevy conveys a boyish worldview with rapturous intensity-a single, sublime at-bat can take up three pages-and he can make even the gross seem sweet, while shading in darker uncertainties around the edges...he writes with a gusto, humor and conviction that are sure to draw the reader in. An entertaining yarn brimming with youthful energy.

Coretta Scott King Honor winner Brenda Woods introduces introverted, daydream-prone Zoe, who’s afraid her real life will never be as exciting as her imaginary one. Zoe Reindeer considers herself “just Zoe”—never measuring up to her too-perfect older sister or her smarty-pants little brother. Truthfully, though, she’d rather just blend in with the plants at the family business, Doc Reindeer’s Exotic Plant Wonderland. She does have one friend, Q, and he’s the best one ever—but he’s moving away, leaving Zoe to fend for herself, and she doesn’t know what she’ll do without him. That is until a tall astronomer from Madagascar comes to the nursery looking for a Baobab tree. His visit starts a ball rolling that makes Zoe long for real adventures, not just imaginary ones—and shows her that perhaps her first real adventure is finally beginning.

Laurel Marks, seventeen, has a weakness for older men. After her father's sudden death, Laurel latches onto a new love-object: her English teacher, Hugh Steadman. Following an encounter in the woods, a flirtation develops between the two, marked by hopeful highs and suicidal lows on Laurel's part. Their romance is eventually consummated one November afternoon, in the arbor where they first met. But Laurel's middle-aged teacher proves to be a more violent lover than she ever anticipated ...

The country bunny attains the exalted position of Easter Bunny in spite of her responsibilities as the mother of twenty-one children.