Books

BOOKS

A HISTORY OF UNNATURAL DISASTERS

Image is a moodboard consisting of nine square pictures arranged in a three by three pattern. Top left: A boy in a shadowed room, throwing open a window to let in a ray of brilliant light. Top center: Red, green, yellow, and pink leaves. Top right: A boy at a desk late at night, only lit by a single lamp, poring over a mess of notes. Middle left: An array of newspapers. Middle center: Black on white text that reads, STILL FCKED UP. Middle right: A silhouette of a person blanketed by silver smoke. Bottom left: Two hands holding each other, dressed in shadows. Bottom center: Brown boots on a verdant green forest floor, sprouts and leaves pushing up through the soil, dead leaves scattered among them. Bottom right: A silver microphone.

All photos from Unsplash. Top left: rafayyansari, Top center: jeremythomasphoto, Top right: kyalloni, Middle left: jontyson, Middle center: valentina18, Middle right: thomasbjornstad, Bottom left: eugenechystiakov, Bottom center: melanie_kreutz, Bottom right: jonathanvez.

Sixteen-year-old Alex Clark has spent the last ten years thinking he was dying of an incurable disease. Turns out, the real illness was his mother’s: Munchausen syndrome by proxy. And when the story hits the headlines, suddenly everyone and their pet iguana has an opinion about him and his family. The worst one? That he was in on the fakery.

Alex tells himself it’s nothing. But the trial is soon, and if the whole world believes he was in on it, then his mom might get off free—throwing their family into chaos. All he wants to do is take control of the story. To do this, he settles on what is clearly the most logical idea: starting a true crime podcast… about his own mother.

Running the podcast means spilling all his family’s messy, messy guts, down to every whispered word and midnight dose. But as Alex digs more into the nightmare that engulfed his family, he finds that there are some secrets he wasn’t ready to know—and that could tear an already-battered home to shreds.

SNAKETOWN, FLORIDA

Moodboard of nine square pictures arranged in a three by three pattern. Top left: Sunset on a beach, viewed through sunglasses in an orange haze. Top center: A woman in a veil, which obscures her face. Sunlight illuminates the orange background. Top right: A shadow of a woman surrounded by fire. Middle left: A close-up of a girl with dark eyes and hair, her expression resolute. Middle center: A neon sign shaped like a comment bubble. Inside the bubble is a heart icon and the number “0”. Middle right: The top of a palm tree. Bottom left: A speckled red and orange snake curled around a camera. Bottom center: Close-up of flames. Bottom right: A shadowed hand obscuring a square of light pouring in from a window.

All photos from Unsplash. Top left: 1mx, Top center: anton_shakirov, Top right: eliapelle, Middle left: roxy_aln, Middle center: prateekkatyal, Middle right: ernestonorman, Bottom left: jcotten, Bottom center: christopher__burns, Bottom right: unlikelymichelle.

Fifteen-year-old June Cassidy has always felt at home in Sunset Springs, a town in rural Florida where everyone is just as weird as she is. Where people find abandoned rocket launchers in the canal, a man raises pythons for a living, and most importantly, no one cares that June has severe psychosis. But when outsiders look at Sunset Springs, all they see is abandoned backwater. And in thirty days, megacorporation Hydrocell will flood the town as part of a water diversion project to save prime beachfront real estate—and wipe Sunset Springs off the map.

June knows the town is worth everything—she just has to prove it. So she and her girlfriend Cecily come up with a brilliant idea: they’ll turn it into a tourist attraction. But the only thing that will bring outsiders to boggy, mosquito-infested Sunset Springs is good old-fashioned Floridian chaos. Together they hatch a plan to stage their very own Florida Man story by unleashing hundreds of pythons on the town as part of a (fake) revenge plot. Soon, Sunset Springs goes viral, and huge crowds arrive to capture the ensuing crisis on social media.

But when various townspeople try to take the story into their own hands, things spiral out of control, and secrets risk being exposed. Worse, June begins to suspect Cecily’s motives are more complicated—and that she isn’t trying to save the town at all.