Amelia and the Magic Scarab

Amelia and the Magic Scarab, my current manuscript, is a contemporary middle grade novel with a touch of magic.

Separated by three thousand years, two eleven-year-old girls’ futures intertwine when Nefret reaches across the millennia from Ancient Egypt to present-day California and frantically hands Amelia a beetle-shaped scarab amulet she has accidentally imbued with unknown powers. 

Amelia, an avid entomologist, begins middle school alone and insecure, abandoned by her only friend after a distressing face-to-antennae encounter with Amelia’s pet Madagascar hissing cockroach. Afraid to be known as ‘bug girl’ to everyone at school, Amelia hides her fascination with insects from everyone except Edgar, a neurodiverse boy even more of an outcast than herself, whom she secretly befriends and enlists in her quest to unravel the mystery of the magical scarab. 

When Edgar asks for Amelia’s help to convince the student council to build a school vegetable garden, even though she could plant milkweed for monarch butterflies, she is too embarrassed to be seen with him. Instead, Amelia uses the scarab’s transformational powers to become a fly on the wall during the council’s meeting, metamorphose into a monarch to understand their plight, and turn into an angry hornet that chases bullies away from Edgar.

Meanwhile Nefret’s sister Amunet has become sick, and in desperation Nefret breaks the time barrier again to summon Amelia, believing she is a goddess. They discover that Amunet is actually Amelia’s great, great, many-times-great grandmother and join forces across time to save her. If they cannot, Amelia herself will cease to exist!

It’s only after Amelia becomes stuck as a hissing cockroach, that she realizes she cannot solve her problems by transforming into something she is not. She needs to show up as her true, extraordinary, bug-loving self to help the monarchs, stand up for Edgar, and save her ancient ancestor.

Polly and Zephyr

Polly and Zephyr is a humorous, early middle grade manuscript about finding friends in unlikely places. A highly intelligent but bored and lonely parrot secretly takes off for adventure in her owner’s new robotic car. Will she realize, before it’s too late, that finding a deep connection with someone is the key to her happiness? Set in the near future, the novel explores the increasingly blurry notion of what it means to be conscious as neuroscience and artificial intelligence advance. Do talking parrots think? Can robotic cars feel? (50,000 words)

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