Here are 52 books that The Summer We Turned Green fans have personally recommended if you like
The Summer We Turned Green.
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Lauren James is the twice Carnegie-nominated British author of many Young Adult novels. She is also a Creative Writing lecturer, freelance editor, screenwriter, and the founder of the Climate Fiction Writers League. She was born in 1992 and has a Master's degree from the University of Nottingham, UK, where she studied Chemistry and Physics. Lauren is a passionate advocate of STEM further education, and many of her books feature female scientists in prominent roles. Her writing has been described as ‘gripping romantic sci-fi’ by the Wall Street Journal and ‘a strange, witty, compulsively unpredictable read which blows most of its new YA-suspense brethren out of the water’ by Entertainment Weekly.
In a world where witches control the climate and are losing control as the weather grows more erratic, a once-in-a-generation witch with the magic of all seasons is the only one who can save earth from destruction. But as her power grows, it targets and kills those closest to her, and when she falls in love with her training partner, she's forced to choose between her power, her love, and saving the earth.
An Instant New York Times Bestseller In a world where witches control the climate and are losing control as the weather grows more erratic, a once-in-a-generation witch with the magic of all seasons is the only one who can save earth from destruction. But as her power grows, it targets and kills those closest to her, and when she falls in love with her training partner, she's forced to choose between her power, her love, and saving the earth. * Featuring an exclusive, flower-stamped case, only available on the first print run! For centuries, witches have maintained the climate, but…
When I look at the challenges our world faces, I find myself imagining how things could be better. For years, I've been captivated by the solutions that could bring about a better future. Through science fiction, especially in the books on this list, I seek out visions of better societies and ideas that could help shape a more hopeful world.
This book stands apart as science fiction without the typical tropes of lasers, interplanetary wars, or grand technological advances. Instead, it offers a meditative space to consider life’s big questions in a world that, while different from our own, feels deeply familiar. I liked the exploration of human emotions and the characters' search for purpose.
I found this to be a beautifully imagined world. It showed that no matter where or when we exist, our need for connection, self-discovery, and belonging remains universal. It's a warm, heartfelt exploration of what it means to be alive.
It's been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend.
One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honour the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of 'what do people need?' is answered.
But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how. They're going to need to ask it a lot.
I'm a writer and poet who loved reading books set in fantasy worlds like Narnia as a child. When I began writing for children, I realised my own magical experiences had been on family trips to India, where goddesses and temples, palaces swarming with monkeys, ice-capped mountains, and elephant rides were part of everyday life. The term ‘magic realism’ seemed to better fit my own fantasy world, Indica. Here, elemental magic is rooted in the myths and culture of young hero Minou Moonshine, expanding her experiences and guiding the search for her destiny. The children’s books I've chosen also contain supernatural and magical elements which are intrinsic to the protagonist’s world – no wardrobe needed!
Wolf Lightdazzled me with its original premise. Three girls, born in different lands on the same day – Zula from Mongolia, Adoma from Ghana, and Linet from Cornwall – communicate through magic.
Zula is a shaman’s daughter, and her father shows her how to connect with her sisters, all destined to be guardians of the earth. Zula’s mountain home is threatened by copper-mining, Adoma’s forest by gold prospectors, and Linet is the guardian of the Linet Lake.
When their homelands are threatened, the girls must use their shared powers to defend them, at great cost to themselves.
'She weaves ancient storytelling magic into words of exceptional beauty... Everyone should read Badoe' Sophie Anderson, author of The House with Chicken Legs.
A leopard dances under the moon. A wolf prowls. A red-beaked bird flies free.
Three girls born on the same day in wolf light are bound together to protect the world. They can dazzle or destroy. They have wind-song and fire-fury at their fingertips, but their enemies are everywhere.
From the bleak steppes to the tropical forests of Ghana and the stormy moors of Cornwall, the lands they love are plundered and poisoned. The girls must rally…
Can stories bring a human scale to something as all-encompassing as climate change? In 2011, I began an MA in Literature and Environment with this question weighing on my mind. I finished my degree two years later with a draft of my debut novel, Under This Forgetful Sky. I’ve come to understand the climate crisis, in many ways, as a crisis of imagination. Its enormity tests the limits of the imaginable. What if the world as we know it ends? What would life look like on the other side? The books on this list reckon with the fears these questions bring while also gesturing beautifully, unsentimentally, courageously toward hope.
The Ones We’re Meant to Find is a young adult dystopian eco-thriller that tells the story of two sisters across alternating timelines.
One timeline follows Cee, who wakes up one day colorblind and devoid of memories, stranded on a deserted island. The other timeline follows Kasey as she tries to understand her sister’s disappearance from within the rank-based eco-city she calls home (a city that rewards citizens who demand the least of the Earth’s dwindling resources).
Though the novel takes impending ecological doom as its ever-present backdrop, it tells a complex, surprising, human story about the quest for meaning and responsibility in an intricately interconnected world.
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Perfect for fans of Marie Lu and E. Lockhart, The Ones We're Meant to Find is a twisty YA sci-fi that follows the story of two sisters, separated by an ocean, desperately trying to find each other in a climate-ravaged future. Cee has been trapped on an abandoned island for three years without any recollection of how she arrived, or memories from her life prior. All she knows is that somewhere out there, beyond the horizon, she has a sister named Kay, and it's up to Cee to cross the ocean and find her.…
I grew up around a lot of suffering over status. I didn’t want to suffer, so I kept trying to understand why everyone plays a game that they insist they don’t want to play. I found my answer when I studied evolutionary psychology. This answer really hit home when I watched David Attenborough’s wildlife documentaries. I saw the social rivalry among our mammalian ancestors, and it motivated me to research the biology behind it. I took early retirement from a career as a Professor of Management and started writing books about the brain chemistry we share with earlier mammals. I’m so glad I found my power over my inner mammal!
This 1950s view of status-seeking is fun because it’s far away yet eerily familiar. The small details that reveal a person’s social class are explored. Your sex life and social life are scrutinized, along with religion, education, politics, and “the totem poles of job prestige.”
Packard wrote many popular sociology books in the 1950s. I loved his book The Human Side of Animals. It shows how animals compete for social dominance because it helps their genes survive. So why does the author blame society for status-seeking in this book? He knows the truth: all societies have status-seeking because we’re all mammals. I think this book has a bitter tone because the author is appealing to bitter readers. Fortunately, we have a choice about playing the game.
My favorite books as a child were the Goosebumps series by R.L. Stine. This began my love of all things horror (including cheesy, campy B-horror). The movies that people love to hate (and also the books that stir up the same emotions) combine humanity's most basic instincts: fear, lust, and humor. Bringing these three together in perfect union creates a combination I can't get enough of. It's what drives my own writing and my insatiable desire to seek out more stories like this.
This list wouldn't be complete without mentioning Laymon. The 'correct' Laymon recommendation for this list would be every book he has ever written, but alas, there can only be one. This book is full of violence, but it's more than just a slasher. The several flashbacks bring the story back to when the protagonists were in college together and highlight their antics and show how strong their bond is. Blood Games has it all: a group of friends making bad decisions, isolation from the outside world, and a bloodthirsty killer. Turns out, the Totem Pole Lodge's gruesome past bleeds into the present...
They meet for one week every year, five young women, best friends since college, in search of fun and thrills. Each year they choose a different place for their reunion. This year it's Helen's choice, and she chose the Totem Pole Lodge. Bad choice.
The Totem Pole Lodge is a deserted resort hotel deep in the woods with a gory, shocking past. Helen has a macabre streak and she can't wait to tell her friends all about what happened at the lodge and why it's now abandoned. But Helen and the others are in for a nasty surprise. The resort…
I’m an OG ATLien (born in Atlanta, Georgia) and served in the US Marine Corps and the US Army. I hold a degree from Kennesaw State University and taught high school social studies from 2004 - 2006, before my military reenlistment which jumpstarted the events in my memoir.
My War is a true story set in 2004 post-invasion Iraq told by a US Army grunt on the bottom of the totem pole.
As a former infantryman near the bottom myself, I could relate to the rollercoaster ride war grunts endure that can go from extreme boredom and amp up to fierce combat in an instance. Buzzell’s language is grunt speak which is unrefined and full of profanity, not for everyone, but it’s the perfect dialect for describing everything from battles to talking trash with other grunts.
I also appreciated that Buzzell guided us through his life as a struggling twentysomething, before joining the army, rather than taking the reader straight to battle. Gen Xers will love \m/.
Colby Buzzell traded a dead-end future for the army-and ended up a machine gunner in Iraq. To make sense of the bloody insanity surrounding him, he started a blog about the war and how it differed from the government's official version. As his blog's popularity grew, Buzzell became the embedded reporter the Army couldn't control-despite its often comical efforts to do so.
The result is an extraordinary narrative, rich with unforgettable scenes: the Iraqi woman crying uncontrollably during a raid on her home; the soldier too afraid to fight; the troops chain-smoking in a guard tower and counting tracer rounds.…
I’m proud to be Irish, from a long heritage of storytellers and poets. Science fiction grabbed me from the first Asimov books I found, and I see the genre as an exploration of possibilities. I volunteer at SF Cons, including Dublin’s Worldcon in 2019. My profession is tree surgery, with an early apprenticeship in demolition, all of which has brought me to interesting places. I also love horses and became a national standard showjumper. I’ve qualified in multimedia journalism and ecology. My novels explore the past, present, and future. I write crime, science fiction, romance, and YA stories, including the Irish Lockdown series about young people during the Pandemic.
In a near future, the creeping changes we already see due to warming climate, produce a sudden dystopia. Young people with rationed food, clean water, and goods, still need to go to school, help their parents and make friends. And then they get asked to help save the world.
I love the energy of this recent publication. The science has been well researched, such as poison ivy thriving in a warmer climate. Middle-grade readers will identify with the characters, and I was delighted by the inclusion of a family in Ireland, chatting over the interwebs with the American schoolkids. Society is visibly shutting down, with resources provided to those in central locations, so anyone outside a city experiences a fast backslide. A few wealthy people are resource hoarders. The determination of the students to learn, share and develop solutions for everyone, leaves me with hope for a positive outcome.
Climate Change Captives 2035 and Project Save is for ages 10 and up with a Lexile reading level of 820L. What would life be like if you were 11 or 12 years old in 2035? If climate change had been a problem, how would people be living? Would schools be different? Would people be living as they do today? What transportation would be available? Think about how people may have adjusted to new hotter temperatures. This story tells what changes people may have had to make and how they adapted to a new normal with less travel. In this story,…
Aliens have fascinated me since childhood. The idea of living on an alien planet with different biology, social structures, and ways of thinking has to be the ultimate act of imagination. Authors use aliens to highlight and interrogate aspects of humanity or to explore different ways of living, and the best alien novels invite me to inhabit the skin of an alien and open my mind to new thoughts and perspectives. As a science fiction writer, these stories inspire me to be more creative in my own flights of imagination. Here are five of the best alien science fiction novels to help you share my journey into the truly alien.
Isaac Asimov rarely wrote about aliens, but this Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel contains an astounding thought experiment, not only imagining a truly alien species but placing them in a different universe with different physical laws from our own.
I first read this novel as a teenager and was blown away by Asimov’s ability to make me understand and care about the fate of such vastly different alien creatures that possessed three distinct sexes and derived their life energy from photosynthesis.
The fact that the novel inextricably links the fate of these creatures with the fate of our own universe gave me a greater appreciation of how truly diverse life can be. A fact–along with the lessons I learned from the other novels listed here–that continues to inform my own writing on aliens and alien cultures.
In the year 2100, the invention of the Electron Pump - an apparently inexhaustible supply of free energy - has enabled humanity to devote its time and energies to more than the struggle for survival, finally breaking free of the Earth.
But the Electron Pump works by exchanging materials with a parallel universe, and such unbalancing of the cosmos has consequences. Humans and aliens alike must race to prevent a vast nuclear explosion in the heart of the Sun - and the vaporisation of the Earth exactly eight minutes later ...
For me, writing space opera was obvious because it's what I like to read. There's so much scope for human and non-human societies out there, complete with the history of how they were created, and the inevitable cut-and-thrust of politics. If the book also has a love story– where do I pay my money? I do like the science in my science fiction to be convincing, though. My background as a computer programmer helps with that and I'm often grateful for my history degree when coming up with convincing empires and events.
The Star King is one of the first science fiction romances I read. It has everything I want in a space opera – politics, fast-paced action, danger, drama, angst, all mixed up with a great love story. I fell in love with the characters, especially the dishy alien alpha male. And I particularly like that the romance is between two mature people with life experience.
An alien king, an Earth woman. Fated mates—Or is fate stacked against them?
Rom B’Kah is fighting for the survival of his people when a beautiful and mysterious warrior from Earth saves his life. When she vanishes without a trace, he vows to find her again.
Years after battlefield trauma sends her life into a tailspin, Jas Hamilton has given up on love. When a galactic empire makes first contact with Earth, she sets out to reclaim her lost sense of adventure—and finds it in the arms of the golden-eyed alien warrior she’s spent a lifetime trying to forget.
