Maybe one day I’ll be ready to become the person I am inside. With a dad who cares about his football team more than me, a mom I miss more than anything, and a best friend who can never know my biggest secret. MORGAN: I know that every birthday should feel like a new beginning, but I’m trapped in this mixed-up body, in this wrong life, in Nowheresville, Tennessee, on repeat. That there’ll be a day, a minute, a second, where it all falls apart and there’s no turning back the clock. But sometimes I worry that Morgan and I won’t be best friends forever. The years where we stuck by each other’s side―as Morgan’s mom died, as he moved across town, as I joined the football team, as my parents started fighting. There was the minute Morgan and I decided we were best friends for life. Jam must fight not only to protect her best friend, but also to uncover the truth, and the answer to the question-How do you save the world from monsters if no one will admit they exist?īuy it: Amazon | B&N | Indiebound Birthdayby Meredith RussoĮRIC: There was the day we were born. Pet has come to hunt a monster, and the shadow of something grim lurks in Redemption’s house.

But when she meets Pet, a creature made of horns and colours and claws, who emerges from one of her mother’s paintings and a drop of Jam’s blood, she must reconsider what she’s been told. With doting parents and a best friend named Redemption, Jam has grown up with this lesson all her life. Having recently become a pagan, April is currently enduring the karmic backlash for all the times she was smug about her atheism.Įarly in her writing practice, April set her narrative defaults to “lots of lesbians” and never looked back.There are no more monsters anymore, or so the children in the city of Lucille are taught. As nostalgia for the 1990s comes into its full bloom, she has become ever more convinced that she was born two or three years too late and missed all the good stuff the first time around. She has a number of hobbies, most of which are boring and predictable. After she recovered from homelessness, she completed her first manuscript by scribbling a few sentences at a time between calls while working in the customer support department for a well-known video game console. After various tribulations in childhood and the frankly disconcerting discovery that she was a girl, she graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a degree in literature, and then promptly lost her job during the 2008 stock crash and recession. April Daniels was born in a military hospital just before it was shut down for chronic malpractice-in hindsight, that should have been an omen.

April daniels author