Circa Now

Photography runs in 11-year-old Circa Monroe’s family: her mother shoots portraits for a living, and her father is an expert at photo restoration. As a fun aside, he also creates “Shopt” images, Photoshopping unusual additions into pictures he’s restoring, such as adding a baby, an oversize potato, and a bugle-playing beaver to an old photo of a family reunion. Circa is devastated when her father is killed in a deadly tornado strike, but a few weeks later, an amnesiac boy named Miles arrives on Circa’s doorstep with a copy of her father’s restored family reunion photo in his hand. Could Circa’s father’s Shopt images be magic, somehow able to make a Photoshopped baby become a real boy? Turner (Sway) offers a moving exploration of grief and an honest depiction of friends and family facing the hardest of times. Examples of Circa’s father’s altered images appear throughout the novel, with narrative captions that give the story a slight Miss Peregrine–meets–Harris Burdick atmosphere and add to its sense of mystery and possibility. Ages 8–12. Agent: Joanna Volpe, New Leaf Literary & Media. (June)