Alyssa: Welcome to New York
Alyssa: Welcome to New York
Sarah Powell
Published by Mary Egan Publishing 1 July 2021, RRP $25
Alyssa is a combat-trained sixteen-year-old from New Zealand. She grew up in Wellington with a French mother and a father in the marines who lives in New York for most of the year. Alyssa had been badly burnt in an Australian bush fire when she was six and has suffered ever since. She’s courageous, ambitious, and highly skilled.
She needs to be because she’s heading to New York.
The city is populated by Marines, rebels, vigilantes, the wealthy elite and the hardworking lower class, entirely cut off from the rest of the US and the world, imprisoned in a self-sustaining anarchy since the civil war began.
Alyssa can’t wait. She’s determined to join her father, now the leader of the Marines.
But then, mere days after arriving, she’s kidnapped. Alyssa finds herself trapped amongst strangers who challenge everything she’s been taught, and she doesn’t know how to sift the fact from the fiction.
What’s really going on in New York City? Who can she trust? She wants answers.
But first she needs to survive.
This is exciting, imaginative, sophisticated, fast-paced and extremely well written fiction with wide appeal for all ages.
SARAH POWELL was six weeks old when she was tucked away under the desk in her mother’s medical practice.
It’s no wonder that at the age of fourteen she figured she’d go to medical school. She relegated to a child’s hobby all the fanfictions she’d written in the wee hours of the morning and the grand ideas for a five-book YA series which had been created with friends around the lunch table. Adult life as Dr Powell awaited.
But halfway through her third year of medical school, she realised she had made a mistake.
She had to leave medical school. Her heart was in her writing and she had a book to finish.
Three hard years, six drafts, and far more loneliness than she could have imagined later, it's finally done. She hopes that as people read it, she will have more opportunities for conversations that might inspire other books, à la those lunch table days. In the meantime she'll be hanging around Wellington, cooking French food, running on a treadmill, and dreaming of travel.
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