I’m happy to announce that my next YA novel will be published by Jolly Fish Press in August 2024. It’s a hi-lo called Firebird Caged, and I can’t wait to share it with you. I can’t show you the spectacular cover art yet, but here’s what it’s about:

Ashley is a high school senior who doesn’t quite fit in in her small and wealthy Wisconsin town–but this is her chance to have the life her hardworking single mother wants for her. Until Ashley finds out she’s pregnant, and the cycle seems to be repeating.

Ashley wants to have the baby, despite her mother’s offer to help her get an abortion, and despite her own fear of being locked into poverty. But the real obstacle Ashley face is from the state of Wisconsin itself. From officials who believe she should have the baby, but don’t believe she’s fit to raise it. After Ashley confesses to her doctor that she’s taken drugs in a misguided effort to cope with stress, she finds herself locked up, detained under Act 292. The state wants to protect the fetus inside Ashley from Ashley herself. And they will go to any lengths to do it.

If Ashley wants to keep her baby from being taken by the system at birth, she’ll have to find the strength to fight back. She’ll have to value herself and her freedom, even as the courts tell her she’s a failure who needs to be controlled. She’ll have to find the fire within.

I call Firebird Caged my “post-Dobbs reproductive rage novel,” and it’s true that I started writing it in the summer of 2022, but the issues it deals with go back further. But it’s also the story of Ashley, who wishes she had been able to take ballet but could never afford it, who spent her first years of high school dealing with the isolation of the pandemic and her senior year experiencing the ups and downs of first love, and who knows that society says it loves babies but hates single mothers. Her decision to face down the judgemental world is not easy, and I hope you all love her as much as I loved writing her.

Those interested can read more about the real law behind this novel in this article from 2013 and this one, from 2022.