Transcendent

by Katelyn Detweiler

Genres: YA Family

Synopsis

A timely work of contemporary magical realism, about a world plagued by violence, and the girl called upon to be a hero.
 
When terrorists bomb Disney World, seventeen-year-old Iris Spero is as horrified as anyone else. Then a stranger shows up on her stoop in Brooklyn, revealing a secret about the mysterious circumstances surrounding Iris’s birth, and throwing her entire identity into question. Everything she thought she knew about her parents, and about herself, is a lie.
 
Suddenly, the press is confronting Iris with the wild notion that she might be “special.” More than just special: she could be the miracle the world now so desperately needs. Families all across the grieving nation are pinning their hopes on Iris like she is some kind of saint or savior. She’s no longer sure whom she can trust—except for Zane, a homeless boy who long ago abandoned any kind of hope. She knows she can’t possibly be the glorified person everyone wants her to be… but she also can’t go back to being safe and anonymous. When nobody knows her but they all want a piece of her, who is Iris Spero now? And how can she—one teenage girl—possibly heal a broken world?

Release date: October 4, 2016

Publisher: Viking Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 448

Sample

Where were you the day Disney World was bombed?

This is the question that will haunt my generation for the rest of our lives. The twenty-fourth of August. An awful ghoul now, still so fresh in our memories, fading into a hazier shadow that will walk beside us until the very end. Our skin will prickle as we drive by a summer carnival or see pictures of an old castle and its arching, majestic towers; when we tuck our own children into bed someday, and they ask us to read them a story filled with princes and princesses. Because our fairy tale ended that day. Our castles were covered in blood.

This type of question is not new, of course. Each generation has its own markers, its own moments that were so devastating, so beyond comprehension, that the world stopped spinning when they first heard the news. Where were you when JFK was shot? When the planes crashed into the Twin Towers?

We come together in the wake of these epic tragedies. We hope for change; we promise ourselves and each other that this won’t happen again, can’t possibly happen again. That this time, our world will be different.

Then it does happen, somehow worse than the last time, despite our intentions. Our world—it is not so different after all. Humanity is predictable in its restlessness and its frustration, its ability to cause destruction, and its ability to so soon forget.

But we cannot forget this.

If there is a next time—if there is a grander, more terrifying next time—the world will end. It must. Because how could there be worse? How could there possibly be anything worse, without our whole broken, beautiful world going up in flames?