We are thrilled to be revealing the cover and an excerpt for Chandra Prasad’s Mercury Boys, which releases on August 3rd 2021 from Soho Teen. Mercury Boys is available to pre-order from Bookshop.org.
History and the speculative collide with the modern world when a group of high school girls form a secret society after discovering they can communicate with boys from the past, in this powerful look at female desire, jealousy, and the shifting lines between friendship and rivalry.
SYNOPSIS
After her life is upended by divorce and a cross-country move, 16-year-old Saskia Brown feels like an outsider at her new school—not only is she a transplant, she’s biracial in a population of mostly white students. One day while visiting her only friend at her part-time library job, Saskia encounters a vial of liquid mercury, then touches an old daguerreotype—the precursor of the modern-day photograph—and makes a startling discovery. She is somehow able to visit the man in the portrait: Robert Cornelius, a brilliant young inventor from the nineteenth century. The hitch: she can see him only in her dreams.
Saskia shares her revelation with some classmates, hoping to find connection and friendship among strangers. Under her guidance, the other girls steal portraits of young men from a local college’s daguerreotype collection and try the dangerous experiment for themselves. Soon, they each form a bond with their own “Mercury Boy,” from an injured Union soldier to a charming pickpocket in New York City.
At night, the girls visit the boys in their dreams. During the day, they hold clandestine meetings of their new secret society. At first, the Mercury Boys Club is a thrilling diversion from their troubled everyday lives, but it’s not long before jealousy, violence, and secrets threaten everything the girls hold dear.
EXCERPT
Loading…
Reload document 
Open in new tab ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chandra Prasad is the author of several books, including Damselfly, a female-driven young adult novel used in schools as a parallel text with Lord of the Flies; On Borrowed Wings, a Connecticut Book Award finalist; Death of a Circus, which Booklist calls “richly textured and packed with glamour and grit”; Breathe the Sky, a fictionalized account of Amelia Earhart’s last days; and Outwitting the Job Market, a guide for young jobseekers. Prasad is the editor of—and a contributor to—Mixed, the first-ever anthology of short stories on the multiracial experience. Her shorter works have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Week, New Haven Noir, Teen Voices, and numerous literary, arts, and poetry journals.
