Starglass

Starglass is my debut novel, forthcoming in the US from Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers in Summer 2013.

For five hundred years, passengers on the generation ship Asherah have lived a regimented lifestyle meant to ensure they reach their destination across the stars. Jobs are selected by the High Council; unmarried citizens find themselves matched; every couple has two children–one boy, and one girl–created for them in a lab. This is how their population has remained steady, and rebellion has been suppressed.

But this rigid life doesn’t work for everyone on the ship. It certainly doesn’t work for sixteen-year-old Terra. She lost her mother to cancer years ago. Now she’s working a job she hates, while her father pushes her toward marrying a boy she knows will never love her back. Terra’s done her best to swallow her lumps and be good, like the generations that have come before her. But when she stumbles across a murder in the ship’s long-abandoned engine rooms, she gets sucked in to a plot to murder the ship’s captain.

The rebels know that Terra has nothing left to lose, but they don’t know that she’s starting to fall for the boy she’s meant to kill. Soon Terra learns that “doing your duty” isn’t as simple as it seems.