Abby Sher – författare

A darkly comic and heartbreakingly honest YA novel about finding the courage to help a friend who can't stop hurting herself.

Until the age of ten, Abby Sher was a happy child in a fun-loving, musical family. But when her father and favorite aunt pass away, Abby fills the void of her loss with rituals: kissing her father''s picture over and over each night, washing her hands, counting her steps, and collecting sharp objects that she thinks could harm innocent pedestrians. Then she begins to pray. At first she repeats the few phrases she remem-bers from synagogue, but by the time she is in high school, Abby is spending hours locked in her closet, urgently reciting a series of incantations and pleas. If she doesn''t, she is sure someone else will die, too. The patterns from which she cannot deviate become her shelter and her obsession. In college Abby is diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and while she accepts this as an explanation for the counting and kissing and collecting, she resists labeling her fiercest obsession, certain that her prayers and her relationship with G-d are not an illness but the cure. She also discovers a new passion: performing comedy. She is never happier than when she dons a wig and makes people laugh. Offstage, however, she remains unable to confront the fears that drive her. She descends into darker compulsions, starving and cutting herself, measuring every calorie and incision. It is only when her earliest, deepest fear is realized that Abby is forced to examine and redefine the terms of her faith and her future. Amen, Amen, Amen is an elegy honoring a mother, father, and beloved aunt who filled a child with music and their own blend of neuroticism. It is an adventure, full of fast cars, unsolved crimes, and close calls. It is part detective story, part love story, about Abby''s hunt for answers and someone to guide her to them. It is a young woman''s radiant and heartbreaking account of struggling to recognize the bounds and boundlessness of obsession and devotion.

Heartfelt, funny, clever YA fiction to appeal to fans of Jandy Nelson, John Green, Jennifer Niven and Ava DellairaLenny is preparing for the apocalypse. Every night, she researches vacuum decay, designer pathogens, that inexplicable sleeping sickness knocking people out in Kazakhstan. Not many sixteen-year-olds are this consumed with the end of the world. But Lenny needs to have some sense of control. Her dad is dying of cancer. Her best friend Julian is graduating early and moving three states away. She''s having to rehearse for a toe-curling interpretive dance show at school, and deal with her mum''s indefatigable jolliness and smoothie-making in the face of the disaster they are confronting. The one thing keeping her hopeful is Dr Rad Ganesh - her father''s oncologist. Surely Lenny can win him round to her charms - and he can save her father? An infectiously funny story with an unforgettable heroine: a story about having to learn to let go of what you hold most dear - and learning to survive.

Nominiert für den Deutschen Jugendliteraturpreis!USA, 2032: Alle Bürger*innen werden durch einen ID-Chip überwacht. Es ist beinahe unmöglich, undokumentiert zu leben, doch genau das tut die 16-jährige Vali. Nachdem sie aus Kolumbien geflohen ist, hat sich ihre Familie ein Leben in Vermont aufgebaut. Als jedoch der ID-Chip ihrer Mutter nicht mehr funktioniert und ihre Stadt nach Undokumentierten durchsucht wird, müssen sie fliehen. Das Ziel: Kalifornien, der einzige Bundesstaat, der sich der Kontrolle entzogen hat. Doch als Valis Mutter festgenommen wird, muss Vali allein mit ihrem Bruder weiter, quer durchs gesamte Land, bevor es zu spät ist.Eine erschreckende, aber zu Herzen gehende Geschichte über den Willen zu überleben, konsequent aus der Sicht einer Migrantin geschrieben.