I’ve written a YA humanist book, Truth and Roses, and am looking for an agent (preferably) or a publisher. If anyone knows of any, or is interested, please feel free to post here. Thanks.
My story is about Rose, she’s a skeptic and burgeoning secular humanist. She’s starting university and is content to remain a wallflower (no pun intended), and keeps her dyslexia hidden. Events conspire otherwise, which brings her to the attention of a humanist organization looking to mentor the next generation of activists. Excited, she starts a humanist club. To attract attention, she debates a creationist and invites an academic to speak at her university. The debate goes wrong, her dyslexia is getting worse, her coursework is suffering, and her speaker gets deplatformed. When she lets a secret slip, her bff commits suicide. In her darkest hour, she is saved from herself. She learns the deeper meaning of family and how to accept herself and her past. She bounces back to survive the ultimate betrayal and fights the university to get the policy overturned. Win or lose, Rose will show her enemies that Thoreau was right, “Truth and roses have thorns about them.”
As a father, I discovered that there is almost no books aimed at older children. There are the old Encyclopedia Brown books that are good at teaching critical thinking, and a couple of books by Joe Nikel, as well as Junior Skeptic, but no YA books that promote skepticism and secular humanism. Media portrayal of skeptics is absolutely abysmal.