Sparked

Fifteen-year-old Laurel Goodwin wakes up to find her older sister Ivy missing from their Airstream trailer in the Oregon redwoods. A recurring nightmare convinces her that Ivy was abducted, but no one takes her dream seriously, including her mom. Laurel, a loner, has to learn to ask for help, and Jasper Blake, a mysterious new kid who shares her love of old books, quickly becomes her ally. Together they find their quiet town holds a deep secret and is the epicenter of a dark prophecy.

Laurel soon learns that her worst enemies, mean girls Peyton Andersen and Mei Rosen, are developing powers that she needs to find and save Ivy. With time running out, Laurel realizes that power doesn't always take the form that you expect. And once she learns to look beyond her snap judgments, she develops an unexpected gift of her own.

Helena Echlin, a native of the UK, is the author of the novel Gone (Random House UK, 2002) and for five years wrote "Table Manners," an etiquette advice column for CHOW, the online food and drink magazine. She has also written on topics from belly-button reshaping to cardio strip tease for publications such as the Guardian, The Times, and The Sunday Telegraph in the UK, and Yoga Journal and The San Francisco Chronicle in the US. She lives in Berkeley, California and teaches fiction-writing online for Stanford.

Malena Watrous is the author of the novel If You Follow Me (Harper Perennial, 2010). She spent her adolescence in Oregon, which inspired the book's setting. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and helped to found the Online Writers' Certificate, Stanford's two-year online novel-writing program. She teaches fiction-writing for Stanford as well as working on her own fiction, and has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times. She lives in San Francisco.