Hazel fidgeted on the sofa. She and her mom had come to visit her grandma, but they weren’t doing anything interesting. They were just sitting in the parlor sipping tea. The cookies had run out and the fabric on the couch was making Hazel’s legs itchy. Her mom and grandma were talking. It seemed like they’d forgotten she was there. 

“Can I play outside?” Hazel asked. Anything would be better than sitting here for one more minute. She got permission to go out to the garden and let out a sigh of relief.

Have you ever heard the expression, “like a phoenix rising from the ashes”? What do you think it means? And where do you think it comes from? Maybe you’ve met phoenixes in books. Fawkes is pretty famous. But are phoenixes real?

Ezra put on his helmet. Today was the big day. His family had been preparing for their move for over a year. Ezra had had to say goodbye to his friends. He’d even had to say goodbye to his dog. Pets weren’t allowed at the first settlement on Mars.

Everyone acted like it was a great thing that Ezra’s family had been chosen as part of the first settlement. His dad was a doctor and his mom was a teacher. They would be very valuable to the community there. But Ezra wasn’t thrilled about it. No pets. No baseball. Not even any potato chips. They had to eat weird space food.

Gavin couldn’t wait to get to Gran’s. He would have two whole weeks on her farm, with her horses to ride and her creek to explore, and her yummy cherry pies to eat. It sounded like heaven.

Sure enough, when he got there, Gran was in the kitchen rolling out pie dough. “I have a little something for you,” she said. She nodded towards a flat package on the table, wrapped in tissue paper and tied with a piece of brown twine.

“What’s this for?” asked Gavin.

“Oh, it’s from your Papa,” said Gran. “He left it for you. He wanted you to have it the summer you turned 14.”

Life is not fair.

“That’s a good lesson to learn,” Momma always says when I tell her so. But the truth is she could make it fairer if she wanted to. She could let me go adventuring, like my brother Panu, instead of having to stay behind. Instead of having to walk the line for her. Is that too much to ask?

On a rainy day in Switzerland, in 1816, an eighteen-year-old woman created a monster. The woman was Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The monster was Frankenstein’s monster, the central character in a tale that is often described as the first science fiction story ever written.