Tag: Penguin 10

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Tuesdays with Tundra

Tuesdays with Tundra

Tuesdays with Tundra is an ongoing series featuring our new releases. The following titles are now available in stores and online!

Iron Widow
By Xiran Jay Zhao
400 Pages | Ages 14+ | Hardcover
ISBN 9780735269934 | Penguin Teen Canada
The boys of Huaxia dream of pairing up with girls to pilot Chrysalises, giant transforming robots that can battle the mecha aliens that lurk beyond the Great Wall. It doesn’t matter that the girls often die from the mental strain. When 18-year-old Zetian offers herself up as a concubine-pilot, it’s to assassinate the ace male pilot responsible for her sister’s death. But she gets her vengeance in a way nobody expected – she kills him through the psychic link between pilots and emerges from the cockpit unscathed. She is labeled an Iron Widow, a much-feared and much-silenced kind of female pilot who can sacrifice boys to power up Chrysalises instead.​ To tame her unnerving yet invaluable mental strength, she is paired up with Li Shimin, the strongest and most controversial male pilot in Huaxia​. But now that Zetian has had a taste of power, she will not cower so easily. She will miss no opportunity to leverage their combined might and infamy to survive attempt after attempt on her life, until she can figure out exactly why the pilot system works in its misogynist way – and stop more girls from being sacrificed.

Little Witch Hazel
By Phoebe Wahl
96 Pages | Ages 4-8 | Hardcover
ISBN 9780735264892 | Tundra Books
Little Witch Hazel is a tiny witch who lives in the forest, helping creatures big and small. She’s a midwife, an intrepid explorer, a hard worker and a kind friend. In this four-season volume, Little Witch Hazel rescues an orphaned egg, goes sailing on a raft, solves the mystery of a haunted stump and makes house calls to fellow forest dwellers. But when Little Witch Hazel needs help herself, will she get it in time? Little Witch Hazel is a beautiful ode to nature, friendship, wild things and the seasons that only Phoebe Wahl could create: an instant classic and a book that readers will pore over time and time again.

Time Is a Flower
By Julie Morstad
56 Pages | Ages 3-7 | Hardcover
ISBN 9780735267541 | Tundra Books
What is time? Is it the tick tick tock of a clock, numbers and words on a calendar? It’s that, but so much more. Time is a seed waiting to grow, a flower blooming, a sunbeam moving across a room. Time is slow like a spider spinning her web or fast like a wave at the beach. Time is a wiggly tooth, or waiting for the school bell to ring, or reading a story . . . or three! But time is also morning for some and night for others, a fading sunset and a memory captured in a photo taken long ago. In this magical meditation on the nature of time, Julie Morstad shines a joyful light on a difficult-to-grasp concept for young readers and reminds older readers to see the wonders of our world, including children themselves, through the lens of time.

We can’t wait to see you reading these titles! If you share these books online, remember to use #ReadTundra in your hashtags so that we can re-post.

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Latinx & Hispanic Heritage Month

Latinx Heritage Month is observed between September 15 and October 15 and honors the anniversary of independence of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Here’s a list of some of our new teen faves by Latinx and Hispanic authors!

Fat Angie: Homecoming
By e.E. Charlton-Trujillo
416 Pages | Ages 14+ | Hardcover
ISBN 9781536208399 | Candlewick
After hitting the road with her friends last summer and taking the stage to sing her heart out in Columbus, Angie finally feels like she’s figuring things out. And her next move? Finally asking Jamboree Memphis Jordan to be her girlfriend. Angie’s got her speech ready on a set of flash cards, but her plans are complicated when her first love, KC Romance, comes cruising back into town. And when a video of Angie’s Columbus performance goes viral, everything gets even more confusing. Kids at school are treating her with respect, she’s being recognized in public, and her couldn’t-be-bothered mother is . . . well, bothered is an understatement. When she learns of an online music competition, Angie decides to start a band. With the help of her brother, Jamboree, and her town’s resident washed-up rock star, Angie puts together a group and gets busy writing songs, because the competition deadline is only two weeks away. Between sorting out her feelings for Jamboree and KC, dealing with her newfound fame, and dodging an increasingly violent and volatile mother, singing seems like the only thing that Angie’s really good at. Can her band of girl rockers actually win? More importantly, can Angie get it together before she loses all sense of herself yet again?

Fat Chance, Charlie Vega
By Crystal Maldonado
352 Pages | Ages 14+ | Hardcover
ISBN 9780823447176 | Holiday House
Charlie Vega is a lot of things. Smart. Funny. Artistic. Ambitious. Fat. People sometimes have a problem with that last one. Especially her mom. Charlie wants a good relationship with her body, but it’s hard, and her mom leaving a billion weight loss shakes on her dresser doesn’t help. The world and everyone in it have ideas about what she should look like: thinner, lighter, slimmer-faced, straighter-haired. Be smaller. Be whiter. Be quieter. But there’s one person who’s always in Charlie’s corner: her best friend Amelia. Slim. Popular. Athletic. Totally dope. So when Charlie starts a tentative relationship with cute classmate Brian, the first worthwhile guy to notice her, everything is perfect until she learns one thing – he asked Amelia out first. So is she his second choice or what? Does he even really see her? Because it’s time people did.

Food-Related Stories
By Gaby Melian
Illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky
64 Pages | Ages 12+ | Paperback
ISBN 9780593223499 | Penguin Workshop
“Food rescued me so many other times – not only because I sold food to survive. I cook to entertain; I cook to be liked; I cook to be loved.” In this installment, chef and activist Gaby Melian shares her personal journey with food – from growing up in Argentina to her time as a Jersey City street vendor and later, as Bon Appetit‘s test kitchen manager. Powerful and full of heart, here, Melian explores how we can develop a relationship with food that’s healthy, sustainable, and thoughtful.

It’s All Love: Reflections for Your Heart and Soul
By Jenna Ortega
240 Pages | Ages 12+ | Hardcover
ISBN 9780593174562 | Random House BFYR
This collection from actress Jenna Ortega is filled with Jenna’s own original quotes and affirmations, alongside intimate, personal stories about growing up Latina in Hollywood, working through depression, falling in – and out of – love, losing close family members, and so much more. Jenna has had to balance her acting career, her private life, and public expectations from a young age, and she’s learned that the only way to get through it all is to wake up every morning and affirm her commitment to herself, her faith, her mental health, and her family. In this honest and moving debut, she shares openly and intimately what it means to live this life of self-appreciation. Jenna’s vulnerability will remind readers that there’s power within us all and we are not alone in our struggles.

Like a Love Song
By Gabriela Martins
304 Pages | Ages 12+ | Paperback
ISBN 9780593382073 | Underlined
Natalie is living her dream: topping the charts and setting records as a Brazilian pop star . . . until she’s dumped spectacularly on live television. Not only is it humiliating – it could end her career. Her PR team’s desperate plan? A gorgeous yet oh-so-fake boyfriend. Nati reluctantly agrees, but William is not what she expected. She was hoping for a fierce bad boy – not a soft-hearted British indie film star. While she fights her way back to the top with a sweet and surprisingly swoon-worthy boy on her arm, she starts to fall for William – and realizes that maybe she’s the biggest fake of them all. Can she reclaim her voice and her heart?

Living Beyond Borders: Growing up Mexican in America
Edited by Margarita Longoria
224 Pages | Ages 12+ | Hardcover
ISBN 9780593204979 | Philomel BFYR
In this mixed-media collection of short stories, personal essays, poetry, and comics, this celebrated group of authors share the borders they have crossed, the struggles they have pushed through, and the two cultures they continue to navigate as Mexican Americans. Living Beyond Borders is at once an eye-opening, heart-wrenching, and hopeful love letter from the Mexican American community to today’s young readers. With works by Francisco X. Stork, Guadalupe Garcia McCall, David Bowles, Rubén Degollado, e.E. Charlton-Trujillo, Diana López, Xavier Garza, Trinidad Gonzales, Alex Temblador, Aida Salazar, Guadalupe Ruiz-Flores, Sylvia Sánchez Garza, Dominic Carrillo, Angela Cervantes, Carolyn Dee Flores, René Saldaña Jr., Justine Narro, Daniel García Ordáz, and Anna Meriano.

Perfectly Parvin
By Olivia Abtahi
320 Pages | Ages 12+ | Hardcover
ISBN 9780593109427 | Putnam BFYR
Parvin Mohammadi has just been dumped – only days after receiving official girlfriend status. Not only is she heartbroken, she’s humiliated. Enter high school heartthrob Matty Fumero, who just might be the smoking-hot cure to all her boy problems. If Parvin can get Matty to ask her to Homecoming, she’s positive it will prove to herself and her ex that she’s girlfriend material after all. There’s just one problem: Matty is definitely too cool for bassoon-playing, frizzy-haired, Cheeto-eating Parvin. Since being herself hasn’t worked for her in the past (see aforementioned dumping), she decides to start acting like the women in her favorite rom-coms. Those women aren’t loud, they certainly don’t cackle when they laugh, and they smile much more than they talk. But Parvin discovers that being a rom-com dream girl is much harder than it looks. Also hard? The parent-mandated Farsi lessons. A confusing friendship with a boy who’s definitely not supposed to like her. And hardest of all, the ramifications of the Muslim ban on her family in Iran. Suddenly, being herself has never been more important. Olivia Abtahi’s debut is as hilarious as it is heartfelt-a delightful tale where, amid the turmoil of high school friendships and crushes, being yourself is always the perfect way to be.

Small Town Monsters
By Diana Rodriguez Wallach
336 Pages | Ages 12+ | Paperback
ISBN 9780593427514 | Underlined
Vera Martinez wants nothing more than to escape Roaring Creek and her parents’ reputation as demonologists. Not to mention she’s the family outcast, lacking her parents’ innate abilities, and is terrified of the occult things lurking in their basement. Maxwell Oliver is supposed to be enjoying the summer before his senior year, spending his days thinking about parties and friends. Instead he’s taking care of his little sister while his mom slowly becomes someone he doesn’t recognize. Soon he suspects that what he thought was grief over his father’s death might be something more . . . sinister. When Maxwell and Vera join forces, they come face to face with deeply disturbing true stories of cults, death worship, and the very nature that drives people to evil.

Summer in the City of Roses
By Michelle Ruiz Keil
336 Pages | Ages 14+ | Hardcover
ISBN 9781641291712 | Soho Teen
All her life, seventeen-year-old Iph has protected her sensitive younger brother, Orr. But this summer, with their mother gone at an artist residency, their father decides it’s time for fifteen-year-old Orr to toughen up at a wilderness boot camp. When their father brings Iph to a work gala in downtown Portland and breaks the news, Orr has already been sent away against his will. Furious at her father’s betrayal, Iph storms off and gets lost in the maze of Old Town. Enter George, a queer Robin Hood who swoops in on a bicycle, bow and arrow at the ready, offering Iph a place to hide out while she tracks down Orr. Orr, in the meantime, has escaped the camp and fallen in with The Furies, an all-girl punk band, and moves into the coat closet of their ramshackle pink house. In their first summer apart, Iph and Orr must learn to navigate their respective new spaces of music, romance, and sex-work activism – and find each other before a fantastical transformation fractures their family forever. Told through a lens of magical realism and steeped in myth, Summer in the City of Roses is a dazzling tale about the pain and beauty of growing up.

This Is How We Fly
By Anna Meriano
480 Pages | Ages 12+ | Hardcover
ISBN 9780593116876 | Philomel BFYR
17-year-old vegan feminist Ellen Lopez-Rourke has one muggy Houston summer left before college. She plans to spend every last moment with her two best friends before they go off to the opposite ends of Texas for school. But when Ellen is grounded for the entire summer by her (sometimes) evil stepmother, all her plans are thrown out the window. Determined to do something with her time, Ellen (with the help of BFF Melissa) convinces her parents to let her join the local muggle Quidditch team. An all-gender, full-contact game, Quidditch isn’t quite what Ellen expects. There’s no flying, no magic, just a bunch of scrappy players holding PVC pipe between their legs and throwing dodgeballs. Suddenly Ellen is thrown into the very different world of sports: her life is all practices, training, and running with a group of Harry Potter fans. Even as Melissa pulls away to pursue new relationships and their other BFF Xiumiao seems more interested in moving on from high school (and from Ellen), Ellen is steadily finding a place among her teammates. Maybe Quidditch is where she belongs. But with her home life and friend troubles quickly spinning out of control – Ellen must fight for the future that she wants, now she’s playing for keeps.

When We Make It
By Elisabet Velasquez
368 Pages | Ages 14+ | Hardcover
ISBN 9780593324486 | Dial BFYR
Sarai is a first-generation Puerto Rican eighth grader who can see with clarity the truth, pain, and beauty of the world both inside and outside her Bushwick apartment. Together with her older sister Estrella, she navigates the strain of family traumas and the systemic pressures of toxic masculinity and housing insecurity in a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn. Sarai questions the society around her, her Boricua identity, and the life she lives with determination and an open heart, learning to celebrate herself in a way that she has been denied. When We Make It is a love letter to girls who were taught to believe they would not make it at all. The verse is evocative and insightful, and readers are sure to be swept into Sarai’s world and rooting for her long after they close the book.

Want more suggestions? Check out last year’s list!

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Tuesdays with Tundra

Tuesdays with Tundra

Tuesdays with Tundra is an ongoing series featuring our new releases. The following titles are now available in stores and online!

Bear Wants to Sing
By Cary Fagan
Illustrated by Dena Seiferling
48 Pages | Ages 3-7 | Hardcover
ISBN 9780735268036 | Tundra Books
A bear finds a ukulele in the woods. It makes a nice sound – PLINK! – and inspires him to write his own song. His friend Mouse would love to hear it. But Bear isn’t the only animal in the forest to find musical inspiration that day, and Snake, Crow, and Tortoise keep taking his turn to perform. When they finally give him the opportunity and meet his song with less enthusiasm than he’d like, the discouraged bear shelves his music career forever . . . but the kindness, empathy, and appreciation of his best friend will prove that his art deserves recognition and can even inspire others. This dryly humorous and sweetly profound collaboration between two critically acclaimed children’s book creators, a follow-up to the masterful King Mouse, has the makings of a modern classic.

Walking in Two Worlds
By Wab Kinew
296 Pages | Ages 12+ | Hardcover
ISBN 9780735269002 | Penguin Teen Canada
Bugz is caught between two worlds. In the real world, she’s a shy and self-conscious Indigenous teen who faces the stresses of teenage angst and life on the Rez. But in the virtual world, her alter ego is not just confident but dominant in a massively multiplayer video game universe. Feng is a teen boy who has been sent from China to live with his aunt, a doctor on the Rez, after his online activity suggests he may be developing extremist sympathies. Meeting each other in real life, as well as in the virtual world, Bugz and Feng immediately relate to each other as outsiders and as avid gamers. And as their connection is strengthened through their virtual adventures, they find that they have much in common in the real world, too: both must decide what to do in the face of temptations and pitfalls, and both must grapple with the impacts of family challenges and community trauma. But betrayal threatens everything Bugz has built in the virtual world, as well as her relationships in the real world, and it will take all her newfound strength to restore her friendship with Feng and reconcile the parallel aspects of her life: the traditional and the mainstream, the east and the west, the real and the virtual.

New in Paperback:

Fairy Mermaid Magic
(Fairy Mom and Me #4)
By Sophie Kinsella
Illustrated by Marta Kissi
160 Pages | Ages 7-10 | Paperback
ISBN 9780735266414 | Puffin Canada
Discover more magical adventures with your little one in this fourth book of the Fairy Mom and Me series from New York Times bestselling author Sophie Kinsella. Ella’s family has a BIG secret – her mom is a fairy! Ella’s dream is to become a fairy like her mom someday . . . but now she wishes for a spell to turn into a mermaid too! In this enchanting book, Ella and her mom decorate the kitchen with magic coloring pencils, catch a robber on Ella’s school trip, and swim with real mermaids!

We can’t wait to see you reading these titles! If you share these books online, remember to use #ReadTundra in your hashtags so that we can re-post.

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National Read a Book Day

September 6 is National Read a Book Day! We read a lot for work and it was hard to choose, but we managed to pick some of our fave titles from 2021! We hope you’ll add some of these to your reading list today.

Little Witch Hazel
By Phoebe Wahl
96 Pages | Ages 4-8 | Hardcover
ISBN 9780735264892 | Tundra Books
Little Witch Hazel is a tiny witch who lives in the forest, helping creatures big and small. She’s a midwife, an intrepid explorer, a hard worker and a kind friend. In this four-season volume, Little Witch Hazel rescues an orphaned egg, goes sailing on a raft, solves the mystery of a haunted stump and makes house calls to fellow forest dwellers. But when Little Witch Hazel needs help herself, will she get it in time? Little Witch Hazel is a beautiful ode to nature, friendship, wild things and the seasons that only Phoebe Wahl could create: an instant classic and a book that readers will pore over time and time again.

Dark and Shallow Lies
By Ginny Myers Sain
432 Pages | Ages 14+ | Hardcover
ISBN 9780593403969 | Razorbill
La Cachette, Louisiana, is the worst place to be if you have something to hide. This tiny town, where seventeen-year-old Grey spends her summers, is the self-proclaimed Psychic Capital of the World – and the place where Elora Pellerin, Grey’s best friend, disappeared six months earlier. Grey can’t believe that Elora vanished into thin air any more than she can believe that nobody in a town full of psychics knows what happened. But as she digs into the night that Elora went missing, she begins to realize that everybody in town is hiding something – her grandmother Honey; her childhood crush Hart; and even her late mother, whose secrets continue to call to Grey from beyond the grave. When a mysterious stranger emerges from the bayou – a stormy-eyed boy with links to Elora and the town’s bloody history – Grey realizes that La Cachette’s past is far more present and dangerous than she’d ever understood. Suddenly, she doesn’t know who she can trust. In a town where secrets lurk just below the surface, and where a murderer is on the loose, nobody can be presumed innocent – and La Cachette’s dark and shallow lies may just rip the town apart.

Whose Poo?
By Daisy Bird
Illustrated by Marianna Coppo
48 Pages | Ages 3-7 | Hardcover
ISBN 9780735267992 | Tundra Books
One day, Daddy Rat announces to his baby rats that he’ll be taking them to the zoo . . . but only if they’re good, which means no talking about poo! And yet, before the family can even leave the house, the two rascally siblings can’t help but wonder . . . what sort of poo would an astronaut do? Shiny, silver, space-age poo! Rocket-powered, weightless poo, and it spins round and round like a planet does, too! Head chefs, balloon sellers, blue whales . . . everyone and everything must have a unique poo, and the siblings simply have to stop and imagine each and every one (much to the chagrin of Daddy Rat, who is getting increasingly irritated with all the poo talk). Once the rats finally reach the zoo, things escalate, because of course each and every animal in the zoo must do a special kind of poo! Finally, Daddy Rat has simply had enough, and is forced to sit down and explain the facts to his curious kids. And when he thinks he may have gotten through to his youngsters, he encounters a surprising (and smelly) twist which will have little rats everywhere laughing out loud!

A Taste for Love
By Jennifer Yen
336 Pages | Ages 12+ | Hardcover
ISBN 9780593117521 | Razorbill
To her friends, high school senior Liza Yang is nearly perfect. Smart, kind, and pretty, she dreams big and never shies away from a challenge. But to her mom, Liza is anything but. Compared to her older sister Jeannie, Liza is stubborn, rebellious, and worst of all, determined to push back against all of Mrs. Yang’s traditional values, especially when it comes to dating. The one thing mother and daughter do agree on is their love of baking. Mrs. Yang is the owner of Houston’s popular Yin & Yang Bakery. With college just around the corner, Liza agrees to help out at the bakery’s annual junior competition to prove to her mom that she’s more than her rebellious tendencies once and for all. But when Liza arrives on the first day of the bake-off, she realizes there’s a catch: all of the contestants are young Asian American men her mother has handpicked for Liza to date. The bachelorette situation Liza has found herself in is made even worse when she happens to be grudgingly attracted to one of the contestants; the stoic, impenetrable, annoyingly hot James Wong. As she battles against her feelings for James, and for her mother’s approval, Liza begins to realize there’s no tried and true recipe for love.

Mad About Meatloaf (A Weenie featuring Frank and Beans Book)
By Maureen Fergus
Illustrated by Alexandra Bye
56 Pages | Ages 6-9 | Hardcover
ISBN 9780735267916 | Tundra Books
Weenie loves his human, Bob. He loves his guinea pig friend Beans and his cat friend Frank. He loves naps, adventures and sharing. In fact, Weenie loves pretty much everything (except the mail carrier). But the thing Weenie loves and desires more than anything else in the world is meatloaf. And he’ll do anything to get it. Join Weenie, Frank and Beans on a laugh-out-loud meatloaf adventure, complete with a trench coat disguise, a wild meatloaf trap and even a hungry wolf.

Walking in Two Worlds
By Wab Kinew
296 Pages | Ages 12+ | Hardcover
ISBN 9780735269002 | Penguin Teen Canada
Bugz is caught between two worlds. In the real world, she’s a shy and self-conscious Indigenous teen who faces the stresses of teenage angst and life on the Rez. But in the virtual world, her alter ego is not just confident but dominant in a massively multiplayer video game universe. Feng is a teen boy who has been sent from China to live with his aunt, a doctor on the Rez, after his online activity suggests he may be developing extremist sympathies. Meeting each other in real life, as well as in the virtual world, Bugz and Feng immediately relate to each other as outsiders and as avid gamers. And as their connection is strengthened through their virtual adventures, they find that they have much in common in the real world, too: both must decide what to do in the face of temptations and pitfalls, and both must grapple with the impacts of family challenges and community trauma. But betrayal threatens everything Bugz has built in the virtual world, as well as her relationships in the real world, and it will take all her newfound strength to restore her friendship with Feng and reconcile the parallel aspects of her life: the traditional and the mainstream, the east and the west, the real and the virtual.

Escape to Witch City
By E. Latimer
312 Pages | Ages 10+ | Hardcover
ISBN 9781101919316 | Tundra Books
Emmaline Black has a secret. She can hear the rhythm of heartbeats. Not just her own, but others’ too. It’s a rhythm she’s learned to control, and that can only mean one thing . . . Emma’s a witch. In a world where a sentence of witchcraft comes with dire consequences and all children who have reached the age of thirteen are tested to ensure they have no witch blood, Emma must attempt to stamp out her power before her own test comes. But the more she researches, the more she begins to suspect that her radically anti-witch aunt and mother are hiding something – the truth about their sister, her Aunt Lenore, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances years ago. The day of the test comes, and Emma’s results not only pair her up with strange new friends, but set her on a course to challenge everything she’s ever been taught about magic, and reveal long-buried family secrets. It seems witches may not have been so easy to banish after all. Secret cities, untapped powers, missing family members – Emma is about to discover a whole new world.

Iron Widow
By Xiran Jay Zhao
400 Pages | Ages 14+ | Hardcover
ISBN 9780735269934 | Penguin Teen Canada
The boys of Huaxia dream of pairing up with girls to pilot Chrysalises, giant transforming robots that can battle the mecha aliens that lurk beyond the Great Wall. It doesn’t matter that the girls often die from the mental strain. When 18-year-old Zetian offers herself up as a concubine-pilot, it’s to assassinate the ace male pilot responsible for her sister’s death. But she gets her vengeance in a way nobody expected – she kills him through the psychic link between pilots and emerges from the cockpit unscathed. She is labeled an Iron Widow, a much-feared and much-silenced kind of female pilot who can sacrifice boys to power up Chrysalises instead.​ To tame her unnerving yet invaluable mental strength, she is paired up with Li Shimin, the strongest and most controversial male pilot in Huaxia​. But now that Zetian has had a taste of power, she will not cower so easily. She will miss no opportunity to leverage their combined might and infamy to survive attempt after attempt on her life, until she can figure out exactly why the pilot system works in its misogynist way – and stop more girls from being sacrificed.

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Caffeine Book Tours Recap

Our friends at Caffeine Book Tours recently wrapped up an excellent tour in support of Xiran Jay Zhao’s Iron Widow. Make sure to catch up with all the participants below!

August 23, 2021

  • A Cup of Cyanide: “Anime as f*ck, seeped in historical Chinese influence, characters, and mythology, and one hell of a power trio!”
  • Lyrical Reads: “Iron Widow digs deep to dismantle the misogyny in a sci-fi/fantasy world that has lifted historical figures and planted them into this new context.”
  • Solace in Reading: “Iron Widow is life-changing, especially for me as an Asian woman, and it’s great to see sexism and the patriarchy called out and challenged in a fantasy novel.”

Credit: Lyrical Reads

August 24, 2021

  • B for Bookslut: “Iron Widow is definitely written with a lot of heart, passion, and soul; it practically leaps off the pages and I was dragged hook, line, and sinker into Zetian’s world.”
  • It’s Just a Coffee Addicted Bibliophile: “This is a fast-paced feminist retelling of the only female Chinese Emperor that had me sitting on the edge of my seat.”
  • Kristy’s Book Reviews: “I just want everyone to read and love this book because I sure did. . . . The wait for book 2 is going to kill me off honestly!”

August 25, 2021

  • Books & Bookish: “All in all, Iron Widow is a breathtaking, thrilling debut novel that defies the norms of a typical YA book.”
  • This Belle Reads Too: “I have no qualms about the book. Iron Widow enraptured me from the beginning till the end.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/CS_FzwGDrFF/

August 26, 2021

  • Binded by Letters: “A book that was a godd*mn powerful dose of futuristic robots, powerful strategies, and a female lead to bow down for. “
  • Kymiee Tries to Read: “I loved the intensity of emotions, the pace of the story, and how compelling it was.”
  • The Paper Reels: Book Spotlight

August 27, 2021

  • China Sorrows: “Wu Zetian, you are stunning. And this is one of my favourite books of the year.”
  • Mel to the Any: “This story is truly so powerful, so beautiful, and so high on my recommendations lists for you all!”
  • Myths n’ Mis-adventures: “I’ve never read a book that is so unabashedly about toppling the patriarchy. It’s gutsy and powerful and delivers blow after blow relentlessly.”

Thank you to everyone who took part in the blog tour and a big thanks to Shealea at Caffeine Book Tours for putting it together!

Are you ready for Iron Widow?

Iron Widow
By Xiran Jay Zhao
400 Pages | Ages 14+ | Hardcover
ISBN 9780735269934 | Penguin Teen Canada
Release Date: September 21, 2021
The boys of Huaxia dream of pairing up with girls to pilot Chrysalises, giant transforming robots that can battle the mecha aliens that lurk beyond the Great Wall. It doesn’t matter that the girls often die from the mental strain. When 18-year-old Zetian offers herself up as a concubine-pilot, it’s to assassinate the ace male pilot responsible for her sister’s death. But she gets her vengeance in a way nobody expected – she kills him through the psychic link between pilots and emerges from the cockpit unscathed. She is labeled an Iron Widow, a much-feared and much-silenced kind of female pilot who can sacrifice boys to power up Chrysalises instead.​ To tame her unnerving yet invaluable mental strength, she is paired up with Li Shimin, the strongest and most controversial male pilot in Huaxia​. But now that Zetian has had a taste of power, she will not cower so easily. She will miss no opportunity to leverage their combined might and infamy to survive attempt after attempt on her life, until she can figure out exactly why the pilot system works in its misogynist way – and stop more girls from being sacrificed.

Tundra Book Group