Bøker av Leslie Hauser

Sixteen-year-old Ivy Higgins is the only student at Carmel Heights High School who listens to cassettes and has a binder decorated with album artwork by 80s band Chasing Eveline. Despite being broken-up since 1989, this rock group out of Ireland means everything to Ivy. They are a reminder of her mom, who abandoned Ivy and her dad two years ago. Now the music of her mom's favorite band is the only connection she has left.Even though Ivy wavers between anger and a yearning to reconnect, she's one-hundred percent certain she's not ready to lose her mom forever. But the only surefire way to locate her would be at a Chasing Eveline concert. So with help from her lone friend Matt-an equally abandoned soul and indie music enthusiast-Ivy hatches a plan to reunite the band.The road to Ireland won't be easy, though. And not just because there is no road. Along the way, they will have to win over their Lady Gaga-loving peers, tangle with some frisky meerkats, and oh yeah, somehow find and persuade Chasing Eveline to play a reunion gig. It's a near-impossible task, but Ivy has to try. If she can't let go of the past, she'll never be able to find joy in the present.

Emma Loukas had a typical teenage life. Until she didn't. After choosing to stay home instead of accompanying her family to a minor league baseball game, Emma is not present when a suicide bomber detonates an explosive device at the entrance to the stadium just as her family arrives. In the months that follow, grief therapy and the gloomy looks from friends and her extended family do nothing but drag Emma further down into the rubble left behind by that deadly April afternoon.To escape the sad reality of her new life, Emma heads across the country to California to spend her senior year with her grandmother. Getting away from her former life is the only way to survive. It doesn't take long, though, for Emma to experience Grandma Connie's dementia, and it's more than a seventeen-year-old is capable of handling on her own. Now, Emma fears she has just made her bad situation worse, and she begins to wonder if it's even worth trying to survive.But when the family mementos on the dresser catch her eye, Emma feels a bit of light flicker inside her. Maybe the way to make sense of her new life is to live the lives her mom, dad, and brother no longer can. So she sets out to achieve each of their dreams. It won't be easy, but it's all Emma has left, and in the process, she just may find out who she's supposed to be.