Mia Garcia, Candice Montgomery, Joy McCullogh - Joint YA Event!

Meet three exciting Young Adult novelists at Lake Forest Park!

Join us for an evening with Mia Garcia, Candice Montgomery, and Joy McCullough.

From the author of Even If the Sky Falls comes The Resolutions, another inspirational and heart-tugging contemporary novel about four friends who make New Year’s resolutions for one another—and the whirlwind of a year that follows. From hiking trips to four-person birthday parties to never-ending group texts, Jess, Lee, Ryan, and Nora have always been inseparable. But now, with senior year on the horizon, they’ve been growing apart. And so, as always, Jess makes a plan. Reinstating their usual tradition of making resolutions together on New Year’s Eve, Jess adds a new twist: instead of making their own resolutions, the four friends assign them to one another—dares like kiss someone you know is wrong for you, find your calling outside your mom’s Puerto Rican restaurant, finally learn Spanish, and say yes to everything. But as the year unfolds, Jess, Lee, Ryan, and Nora each tests the bonds that hold them together. And amid first loves, heartbreaks, and life-changing decisions, beginning again is never as simple as it seems.

Mia García was born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, but now lives in New York under a pile of to-be-read books. Mia earned her MFA from the New School.

Friday Night Lights meets Dear Martin in Home and Away, a thought-provoking coming-of-age story about family, identity, and forgiveness. Tasia Quirk is young, Black, and fabulous. She's a senior, she's got great friends, and a supportive and wealthy family. She even plays football as the only girl on her private high school's team. But when she catches her mamma trying to stuff a mysterious box in the closet, her identity is suddenly called into question. Now Tasia’s determined to unravel the lies that have overtaken her life. Along the way, she discovers what family and forgiveness really mean, and that her answers don’t come without a fee. An artsy bisexual boy from the Valley could help her find them—but only if she stops fighting who she is, beyond the color of her skin.

Candice Montgomery is an LA transplant currently residing in Seattle. By day, she teaches dance and works in the land of early childhood Deaf education. By night, she writes YA lit about Black teens across all their intersections. Home and Away is her debut novel.

Her mother died when she was twelve, and suddenly Artemisia Gentileschi had a stark choice: a life as a nun in a convent or a life grinding pigment for her father’s paint.She chose paint. By the time she was seventeen, Artemisia did more than grind pigment. She was one of Rome’s most talented painters, even if no one knew her name. But Rome in 1610 was a city where men took what they wanted from women, and in the aftermath of rape Artemisia faced another terrible choice: a life of silence or a life of truth, no matter the cost. Blood, Water, Paint is a portrait of an artist as a young woman, filled with the soaring highs of creative inspiration and the devastating setbacks of a system built to break her.

Joy McCullough writes books and plays from her home in the Seattle area, where she lives with her husband and two children. She studied theater at Northwestern University, fell in love with her husband atop a Guatemalan volcano, and now spends her days surrounded by books and kids and chocolate. Blood Water Paint is her debut novel.