The Sevenfold Hunters
by Rose Egal
Page Street Kids
Sci-fi fans will love this genre-bending debut full of cutthroat school politics and the speculative intrigue of alien contact.
There’s nothing hijabi alien hunter Abyan wants more than to graduate from Carlisle Academy and finally rid the Earth of aliens, the Nosaru.
Everything is going to plan until the Nosaru kill one of Abyan’s squad mates. To make matters worse, the school admins replace her elite squad member with a sub-par new recruit, Artemis. Despite Artemis failing every test—and bringing the team down with her—their cutthroat instructors refuse to kick her out.
Together Abyan, Artemis and the rest of the team unravel the mystery of why Artemis is actually there, what the Nosaru really want, and what Carlisle Academy has been hiding from them all.
Summary and cover image via Edelweiss
Planet Omar: Incredible Rescue Mission
By Zanib Mian
Illustrated By Nasaya Mafaridik
Penguin Random House/Penguin Young Readers
Omar has to solve the mystery of his missing teacher in the third installment of this imaginative, highly-illustrated #OwnVoices middle-grade series.
Omar is going on his biggest adventure yet–a trip to Pakistan! But his excitement about the trip is interrupted by some shocking news: his amazing teacher is not coming back to school, and no one will say why.
When Omar and his friends start investigating, the hints they overhear and clues they find lead them to an alarming conclusion–it must be aliens!
Omar has a huge imagination, but saving his teacher from aliens seems far-fetched even to him. He’s going to need out-of-this-world creative thinking and a huge spirit of adventure to solve this mystery!
Cover image and summary via Penguin Random House
This review was originally published in the November/December issue of Horn Book magazine and can also be found on the Horn Book website.
I Hope You Get This Message
by Farah Naz Rishi
High School HarperTeen 420 pp. g
10/19 978-0-06-274145-5 $17.99
e-book ed. 978-0-06-274147-9 $9.99
When the world learns that omnipotent aliens will decide humanity’s fate in eight days, chaos erupts, and three teens strive to make their (potentially) final days count. Cate is charged by her mother, who has schizophrenia, to find the father who abandoned them — and who her mother believes is an alien. Adeem, an amateur hacker, searches for his sister, estranged from their Pakistani American Muslim family after she came out as a lesbian. Crossing paths in Reno, Cate and Adeem head to Roswell, where Jesse, the third teen, is convincing desperate people that he can (for a fee) transmit their pleas for salvation to the aliens, using a machine created by his now-deceased ne’er-do-well father. Rishi’s debut novel skillfully addresses complex contemporary issues on both the global (environmental damage, war, greed) and personal (identity, mental health) scales. It also tackles prejudice and the ways existential fatalism can inordinately affect marginalized people. But even given these themes and the novel’s dark story line, Rishi ends on a hopeful note of possibility, using an adapted quote from Rumi: “Your pain is where the light enters you.”
From the November/December 2019 Horn Book Magazine.