Rea and the Blood of the Nectar by Payal Doshi
It all begins on the night Rea turns twelve. After a big fight with her twin brother Rohan on their birthday, Rea’s life in the small village of Darjeeling, India, gets turned on its head. It’s four in the morning and Rohan is nowhere to be found.
It hasn’t even been a day and Amma acts like Rohan’s gone forever. Her grandmother, too, is behaving strangely. Unwilling to give up on her brother, Rea and her friend Leela meet Mishti Daadi, a wrinkly old fortune-teller whose powers of divination set them off on a secret quest. In the shade of night, they portal to an otherworldly realm of Astranthia, a land full of magic and whimsy.
Rea must solve clues that lead to Rohan, find a way to rescue him and save Astranthia from a potentially deadly fate. But the clock is ticking. Can she rescue Rohan, save Astranthia, and live to see it all?
Telescope by Arushi Aggarwal
Telescopes have always been a part of Bea Stonefield’s life. After Bea tries out an old telescope, she is amazed by what she sees. Instead of stars in the night sky, she finds a boy on a different planet, Xylyphus. When Bea is unintentionally transported to Xylyphus, she discovers a world filled with darkness and hardship. She learns that it was once a thriving place. But the land had fallen into ruin under the leadership of an evil tyrant, who has changed everything, leading to hunger and widespread poverty.
In Arushi Aggarwal’s thrilling, high-stakes sci-fi novel - told in rotating perspectives - it's a race against time to get to the palace and take down the evil tyrant once and for all. Along the way Bea and her friends discover truths about themselves and the pasts they never knew they had. Will they make it in time to save Xylyphus, or will they meet an untimely demise?