The Whispering Dark

Andrew’s lavish debut, redolent with poetic prose and fantastical happenings, follows 18-year-old Delaney “Lane” Meyers-Petrov, who’s Deaf and uses a cochlear implant. Desperate to forge her own identity and sick of being coddled by her family ever since a childhood near-death experience resulted in hearing loss, Lane applies for and receives a scholarship to Howe University’s elite Godbole School of Neo-Anthropological Studies, a program considered a “magnet for those who dabbled in the occult” and rumored to teach their students how to step into different worlds. Despite her initial excitement on entering the program, she struggles to navigate a lack of accommodations, ableist professors, her own internalized ableism, and her arrogant and recalcitrant TA, 21-year-old Colton Price. But when Godbole students turn up dead, and she discovers that Colton is a member of a secret occult club that’s messing with the boundaries of life and death, she must develop her own burgeoning supernatural abilities to solve the mystery. Andrew handily weaves swoony romance and ominous horror elements to deliver a lush dark academia narrative in which death is always on the horizon. Characters default to white. Ages 14–up. Agent: Josh Adams, Adams Literary. (Oct.)