The Glade

Ellen Oh’s Spirit Hunters meets Katherine Arden’s Small Spaces in this middle grade supernatural mystery following a girl whose discovery of a magical clearing near her summer camp ends up putting her best friend in danger.

Pina’s first trip to summer camp is a chance to escape her overbearing parents and finally go on an adventure with her best friend, Jo. But Camp Clear Skies hides a secret: a clearing in the deep woods the older kids call “the Glade.” After falling asleep here, Pina and Jo are able to enter one another’s dreams, transforming into superheroes and knights in shining armor, fighting back their nightmares in epic adventures.

At first, the friends think they’ve discovered a secret more exciting than any video game—until Pina’s nightmares start leaking out into waking life. Worse, something seems to have followed them back from those dreams…and whatever it is, it’s taking over Jo. Jo has always been the superhero in their friendship, but Pina can’t just abandon them to their fate.

To save her friend, Pina journeys deeper into the Glade than she ever has before, facing the worst of her own fears and Jo’s. There, she must confront the consciousness trying to steal her friend’s body and learn what happened twenty years ago that shut down Camp Clear Skies and changed the Glade forever.

Former neuroscientist, Astounding Award–nominated and Judith A. Markowitz Award–winning author Naseem Jamnia (they/them) writes inclusive speculative fiction for kids, teens, and adults. Their adult fantasy novella The Bruising of Qilwa was a finalist for the Crawford, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. Their story in the YA horror anthology The White Guy Dies First was called “artful” and “reminiscent of director David Cronenberg’s work” by Kirkus Reviews. Naseem has been a Bitch Media, Lambda Literary, and Otherwise fellow and the inaugural Samuel R. Delany fellow, and their nonfiction has been published in The Washington Post, The Rumpus, Cosmopolitan, New Orleans Review, and others. Naseem is the managing editor and book designer for Sword & Kettle Press, a tiny publishing house of inclusive speculative writing. A Persian Chicagoan and child of Iranian immigrants, Naseem lives outside Reno, Nevada, with their geologist husband and four furred creatures. The Glade is their middle grade debut. Find out more and join their newsletter at NaseemWrites.com or on Instagram @JamsterNazzy.