Pawned

For fans of Stranger Things and the works of Neil Gaiman, Pawned is a Young Adult novel that blends dark fantasy adventure and noir - on the New Jersey boardwalk.

You can hock almost anything at my family's pawn shop...even your own soul.

You think running a pawn shop full of cursed objects with your dad and grandpops is cool? Try it for a week and get back to me. Now try picking up any random object and seeing its creeptastic history play out right before your eyes - yup, that's my little "gift." It's my job to sort out what's haunted and hexed from what's not, and do my best to keep all of us - including Bert, our ice-cream-truck-driving-lizard demon - employed.

So it wasn't all sunshine, roses, and possessed samurai swords even before grandpops' heart attack - but now things are garden-gnome levels of bad. Dad made a deal with the wrong end of the dark side to save grandpops' life, putting my whole family smack dab between the forces of evil and our friendly local blow-your-pawn-shop-to-smithereens mobsters. And Lily next door...I shouldn't even be thinking about Lily.

All I ever wanted was to get out of this crap town and away from my messed-up family, and instead it looks like I'm gonna have to use every scrap of magic in this joint or there won't be any family left to leave behind...Laura Bickle is the author of the YA novels The Hallowed Ones and The Outside (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), as well as The Wildlands series with Harper Voyager. More information about her books, feline overlords, and out-of-control action figure collection can be found at www.laurabickle.com.