As a giant asteroid hurtles toward Los Angeles, 17-year-old physicist Yuri Strelnikov arrives from Russia to help U.S. scientists frantically working to minimize the impact. On a break, Yuri meets 16-year-old Dovie. With a purple house, a pet bird named Woodie Guthrie, and an annual celebration of Dylan’s first album release anniversary, Dovie and her free-spirited family are unlike anything analytical Yuri has known. As the scientists race against the clock, Yuri is frustrated that his untested but rigorously developed theories on anti-matter aren’t considered. When the threat parameters change, Yuri takes a staggering risk that saves the day. He’s a hero, but the U.S. government has no plans to let him go home: He was caught taking photos of the classified weapons he needed to understand in developing a solution. So Dovie and her older brother, wheelchair-user Lennon, come up with a plan. This fresh, funny book requires suspension of disbelief: everything from the ease with which Yuri moves in and out of NASA’s high-security facility to Dovie’s hippie family to the threat at the story’s heart is over the top. But Yuri and Dovie, smart and thoughtful and deep, are genuine if singular teen characters in a story that is also rich in ideas—a work both blithe and intellectually satisfying. (Age 12 and older)

Brimming with humor and one-of-a-kind characters, this end-of-the-world debut novel will grab hold of Andrew Smith and Rainbow Rowell fans.

An asteroid is hurtling toward Earth. A big, bad one. Maybe not kill-all-the-dinosaurs bad, but at least kill-everyone-in-California-and-wipe-out-Japan-with-a-tsunami bad. Yuri, a physicist prodigy from Russia, has been recruited to aid NASA as they calculate a plan to avoid disaster.

The good news is Yuri knows how to stop the asteroid--his research in antimatter will probably win him a Nobel prize if there's ever another Nobel prize awarded. But the trouble is, even though NASA asked for his help, no one there will listen to him. He's seventeen, and they've been studying physics longer than he's been alive.

Then he meets (pretty, wild, unpredictable) Dovie, who lives like a normal teenager, oblivious to the impending doom. Being with her, on the adventures she plans when he's not at NASA, Yuri catches a glimpse of what it means to save the world and live a life worth saving.

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