Join us for an exciting event with authors Anna Carey and Gabrielle Moss to celebrate the release of THIS IS NOT THE JESS SHOW!

This event will be streamed on Crowdcast. RSVP here! 


About This is Not The Jess Show
The year is 1998: Titanic just won 6 Oscars, boy bands are dominating MTV’s airwaves, and like any other teenager Jess Flynn is just trying to survive high school. Between a crush on her childhood best friend, overprotective parents, and her sister’s worsening health, the only constant is her hometown of Swickley, which feels smaller by the day. Jess is resigned to her small-town life, until the day she discovers a mysterious device with an apple logo, causing her to question everything and everyone she’s ever known. As more cracks appear in Jess’s world, she faces a choice: can she live the rest of her life knowing it’s a lie or should she risk everything for the truth?
 
A fast-paced, mind-bending YA thriller packed with ‘90s pop culture references and perfect for fans of Black Mirror, This Is Not the Jess Show will keep readers guessing until the very end.

About the Authors

Anna Carey (she/her) is the author of Blackbird,
Deadfall, and the Eve trilogy. She lives in
Los Angeles.

Gabrielle Moss (she/her) is the author of GLOP: Nontoxic, Expensive Ideas That Will Make You Look Ridiculous and Feel Pretentious (HarperCollins, 2016). She is a features editor at Bustle and her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Slate, GQ.com, the Hairpin, and many other fine publications. She lives in New York City. She is definitely a Jessica. Follow her on Twitter @Gaby_Moss.


 

In celebration of International Women’s Day, join She’s the First for a conversation about the futures girls dream of.

Register here! 

*This is an event held by the publisher and only associated with the Bookshop through book sales*

 

About this Event

In celebration of International Women’s Day, join She’s the First Co-Founders Christen Brandt & Tammy Tibbetts and Girlhood author Masuma Ahuja for a conversation about the futures girls dream of. Across different cultures and continents, what are the most common goals girls have for their futures? What are the biggest obstacles that stand in their way – and what 3 things can most girls do to achieve their dreams?

Girls in the She’s the First community will interview the authors and lead an interactive live chat with the audience. Don’t miss this event if:

• You want to learn how to make an impact in your community
• You want to know what it means to put girls’ voices first
• You want to connect with girls’ rights leaders from around the world

This event is intended for youth change-makers and their allies.

About Girlhood

What does a teenage girl dream about in Nigeria or New York? How does she spend her days in Mongolia, the Midwest, and the Middle East?
 

All around the world, girls are going to school, working, dreaming up big futures—they are soccer players and surfers, ballerinas and chess champions. Yet we know so little about their daily lives. We often hear about challenges and catastrophes in the news, and about exceptional girls who make headlines. But even though the health, education, and success of girls so often determines the future of a community, we don’t know more about what life is like for the ordinary girls, the ones living outside the headlines.

From the Americas to Europe to Africa to Asia to the South Pacific, the thirty teens from twenty-seven countries in Girlhood share their own stories of growing up through diary entries and photographs, and the girls’ stories are put in context with reporting and research that helps us understand the circumstances and communities they live in. This full-color, exuberantly designed volume is a portrait of ordinary girlhood around the world, and of the world, as seen through girls’ eyes.

 

 

About Impact

Christen Brandt and Tammy Tibbetts, who built the wildly successful nonprofit She’s the First from the ground up, know how to create meaningful impact in a world that so desperately needs it. When you feel your own pull to be part of social change, where do you start and how do you keep going?
 

In Impact, their stories and interactive activities will help you find your focus, identify partners, and plug into movements for long-term, systemic change. Equally important, you’ll learn how to address biases, practice allyship, and shift power to become more inclusive and effective in your journey.

Does your family have a few wordless picture books sitting on your bookshelves that don't get much attention? Or maybe you never explored this type of picture book?

Join the Astoria Bookshop & our Children & Family Events Specialist for a relaxing hour as we learn how to tell a story when there are no words on a page. Register here for the workshop!


We will explore several new and not-so-new wordless picture books and discover that there are so many ways to read these stories. (Including having a child read them TO you!) So take a moment to turn off the executive function portion of your brain and listen to some stories. 

Note: This is intended for adults who want to learn how to read wordless picture books to little humans. This is not a part of our story time series. 

Join us for an exciting discussion between authors Olivia Chadha and Mike Chen for RISE OF THE RED HAND!

This event will be streamed on Crowdcast. RSVP here!

About Rise of the Red Hand
The South Asian Province is split in two. Uplanders lead luxurious lives inside a climate-controlled biodome, dependent on technology and gene therapy to keep them healthy and youthful forever. Outside, the poor and forgotten scrape by with discarded black-market robotics, a society of poverty-stricken cyborgs struggling to survive in slums threatened by rising sea levels, unbreathable air, and deadly superbugs.

Ashiva works for the Red Hand, an underground network of revolutionaries fighting the government, which is run by a merciless computer algorithm that dictates every citizen’s fate. She’s a smuggler with the best robotic arm and cybernetic enhancements the slums can offer, and her cargo includes the most vulnerable of the city’s abandoned children.

When Ashiva crosses paths with the brilliant hacker Riz-Ali, a privileged Uplander who finds himself embroiled in the Red Hand’s dangerous activities, they uncover a horrifying conspiracy that the government will do anything to bury. From armed guardians kidnapping children to massive robots flattening the slums, to a pandemic that threatens to sweep through the city like wildfire, Ashiva and Riz-Ali will have to put aside their differences in order to fight the system and save the communities they love from destruction.

About the Authors
Olivia Kaur Chadha (she/her) began her writing career with a stint in Los Angeles writing comic book scripts for Fathom. She has a Ph.D in creative writing from Binghamton University and a master's in creative writing from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research centers on exile, folklore and fairy tales, and the environment. She is first-generation American of Punjabi Sikh and Latvian/German descent and lives in Colorado with her family and two very odd dogs.

Mike Chen (he/him) is a lifelong writer, from crafting fan fiction as a child to somehow getting paid for words as an adult. He has contributed to major geek websites (The Mary Sue, The Portalist, Tor) and covered the NHL for mainstream media outlets. A member of SFWA and Codex Writers, Mike lives in the Bay Area, where he can be found playing video games and watching Doctor Who with his wife, daughter, and rescue animals. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram: @mikechenwriter

Join us for a panel on retellings with authors Aiden Thomas, K. Ancrum, L.L. McKinney and Chloe Gong!

This event will be streamed on Crowdcast, RSVP here!

Info on Signed Bookplates (Please Read)
For signed bookplates for Lost in the Never Woods, please enter your pre-order confirmation here. Materials will be shipped seperately and not by the Astoria Bookshop. You must pre-order in order to recieve a bookplate. 

For signed bookplates for A Blade So Black and These Violent Delights, order a copy through us and it will include a signed bookplate! (While Supplies Last)

For a signed bookplate for Darling, pre-order through us and recieve a bookplate when the book releases on June 22nd, 2021. (While Supplies Last)

About Lost in the Never Woods
When children start to go missing in the local woods, a teen girl must face her fears and a past she can't remember to rescue them in this atmospheric YA novel, Lost in the Never Woods from the author of Cemetery Boys.It’s been five years since Wendy and her two brothers went missing in the woods, but when the town’s children start to disappear, the questions surrounding her brothers’ mysterious circumstances are brought back into the light. Attempting to flee her past, Wendy almost runs over an unconscious boy lying in the middle of the road...Peter, a boy she thought lived only in her stories, asks for Wendy’s help to rescue the missing kids. But, in order to find them, Wendy must confront what’s waiting for her in the woods

About Darling
On Wendy Darling’s first night in Chicago, a boy called Peter appears at her window. He’s dizzying, captivating, beautiful—so she agrees to join him for a night on the town.

Wendy thinks they’re heading to a party, but instead they’re soon running in the city’s underground. She makes friends—a punk girl named Tinkerbelle and the lost boys Peter watches over. And she makes enemies—the terrifying Detective Hook, and maybe Peter himself, as his sinister secrets start coming to light. Can Wendy find the courage to survive this night—and make sure everyone else does, too?

About A Blade So Black
The first time the Nightmares came, it nearly cost Alice her life. Now she's trained to battle monstrous creatures in the dark dream realm known as Wonderland with magic weapons and hardcore fighting skills. Yet even warriors have a curfew.

Life in real-world Atlanta isn't always so simple, as Alice juggles an overprotective mom, a high-maintenance best friend, and a slipping GPA. Keeping the Nightmares at bay is turning into a full-time job. But when Alice's handsome and mysterious mentor is poisoned, she has to find the antidote by venturing deeper into Wonderland than she’s ever gone before. And she'll need to use everything she's learned in both worlds to keep from losing her head... literally.

About These Violent Delights 
The year is 1926, and Shanghai hums to the tune of debauchery.

A blood feud between two gangs runs the streets red, leaving the city helpless in the grip of chaos. At the heart of it all is eighteen-year-old Juliette Cai, a former flapper who has returned to assume her role as the proud heir of the Scarlet Gang—a network of criminals far above the law. Their only rivals in power are the White Flowers, who have fought the Scarlets for generations. And behind every move is their heir, Roma Montagov, Juliette’s first love…and first betrayal.

But when gangsters on both sides show signs of instability culminating in clawing their own throats out, the people start to whisper. Of a contagion, a madness. Of a monster in the shadows. As the deaths stack up, Juliette and Roma must set their guns—and grudges—aside and work together, for if they can’t stop this mayhem, then there will be no city left for either to rule.

About the Authors
Aiden Thomas (he/they) is a New York Times Bestselling Author with an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. Originally from Oakland, California, they now make their home in Portland, OR. As a queer, trans Latinx, Aiden advocates strongly for diverse representation in all media. Aiden’s special talents include: quoting The Office, useless trivia, Jenga, finishing sentences with “is my FAVORITE”, and killing spiders. Aiden is notorious for not being able to guess the endings of books and movies, and organizes their bookshelves by color.

K. Ancrum (she/her) is the author of  the award winning thriller THE WICKER KING,  a lesbian romance THE WEIGHT OF THE STARS and the upcoming Peter Pan thriller DARLING. K. is a Chicago native passionate about diveristy and representation in young adult fiction. She currently writes most of her work in the lush gardens of the Chicago Art Institute. 

Named one of The Root’s 100 Most Influential African-Americans of 2020, L.L. McKinney (she/her) is a writer, a poet, and an active member of the kidlit community. She’s an advocate for equality and inclusion in publishing, the co-founder of Juneteenth Book Fest, and the creator of the hashtags #PublishingPaidMe and #WhatWOCWritersHear. She’s also a gamer girl and an adamant Hei Hei stan. She is the author of A Blade So Black, A Dream So Dark, and A Crown So Cursed.