The Heart is Not a Size

Next March, my fourth YA novel will be released by HarperTeen. The Heart is not a Size was inspired by a trip that I took, along with my husband, son, and two dozen others, to a Juarez squatters' village called Anapra. It features a girl named Georgia (who just happens to be an anxiety-prone photographer) and her best friend, Riley. It asks the question, What difference can one person make?, while plumbing buried, dangerous secrets.

Today the cover for Heart was approved. I thank Jill Santopolo and Carla Weise for seeing it through, and I share it with you here. I share as well this small excerpt:

What I remember now is the bunch of them running: From the tins, which were their houses. Up the white streets, which were the color of bone. All the way to the top of Anapra, to where we were standing in our second-hand scrubs, and where Riley said, “They might as well be flowers, blown right off their stalks,” and Sophie said, “This is so completely wild,” and The Third said nothing at all. The Third: He wasn’t talking yet. He was all size and silence.

“I should tell Mack,” I said, but I didn’t budge, didn’t even turn and glance back toward where Mack and the others were digging in, hanging tarp, toting two-by-fours from one angle of sun fizzle to another. Because the kids of Anapara might have been chunks of blown-off petals, like Riley said, but they mostly looked like wings to me, flying and flying in their bright, defying best, their yellow cotton shirts, red fringy skirts, blue trousers. They looked like something no one should lose to a single instant of forgetting.

It was only our second day.

We’d pinned everything on nothing.