amyarielfitz

3 Key Components of Middle-Grade Novels

By Amy Fitzgerald, Senior Editor I’ve been in a flurry of middle-grade manuscript acquisitions lately, which means I’ve been reading a lot of middle-grade submissions and buying some of my favorites. You’ll see them hitting shelves in a year or two, after the Carolrhoda book-making process has worked its magic. Maybe you’re wondering how I decide […]Read more

“Like Getting Punched in the Face”: Discovering Debut YA The Disturbed Girl’s Dictionary

By Amy Fitzgerald, Senior Editor In early March of 2017, my boss sent me a YA novel manuscript to read. She had been kind enough to share a lot of her incoming submissions with me as I worked on building up my own contacts with literary agents, so there wasn’t anything unusual about this forwarded […]Read more

Cutting to the Chase: 3 High-Interest YA Series for Reluctant Readers

By Amy Fitzgerald, Editor Confession time: I have a shamefully short attention span. When I think about certain books I read as a kid, I’m amazed that I had the patience to get through them. One recent evening, I got home from work, looked at the stack of verging-on-overdue novels I’d checked out from the […]Read more

YA Novels that Challenge Assumptions

By Editor Amy Fitzgerald In November of 2015, I checked in with my then-boss, Alix Reid, about her backlog of manuscript submissions. (As a newbie trade editor, I was still dreaming of the day when I, too, would have more manuscripts in my inbox than I could hope to review in a timely manner.) Alix […]Read more

Best of the blog