Breaking news! I sold my next young adult book! To Holt/MacMillan! In July 2011!

So maybe I’m a little slow on my book news. But I really am excited about Bubble World, which will be in stores in July 2013. Don’t tell my other titles, but I think it’s my favorite book, and not just because it has the cutest cover in the world.

(Those models are not just any old dolls, by the way. Laurie Everton of The Barbie Canvas hand-painted them to look like my characters.)

Here’s what the book is about:

Freesia Summers lives on the island of Agalinas, a hidden Pacific paradise somewhere off the coast of California. Northern California or Southern? Freesia doesn’t know. Or care. She’d much rather spend her time thinking about things that matter, like glittery eye makeup and lovely boys. Freesia has everything a girl could want: an enormous closet, her own ocean-view balcony, a pink itty car, singing peacocks, and a magical bubble that lets her talk to her besties and keep track of her de-vicious clothes.

If Freesia’s life seems too good to be true, well, there’s a reason for that. She does her best to ignore the signs that something in her world has gone terribly wrong: the electrical outages, the time slips, the sudden departures that border on disappearances. But when a blackout lands her in an unbeautiful place — and in an equally unbeautiful but oddly familiar body — reality hits her head-on.

As far as Freesia is concerned, reality is overrated.

To read the first chapter, go here. And if you’d like to pre-order (hey, I’m only thinking about you and your busy schedule), check out Amazon, Books-a-Million and Barnes & Noble (which doesn’t have the pre-order link up at the time of this posting, but should soon).