Rebecca Podos Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Anthologies

Rebecca Podos

Rebecca Podos, a graduate of the Writing, Literature and Publishing program at Emerson College, has had her fiction published in a multitude of journal publications. Included are the journals- Glimmer Train, Smokelong Quarterly, Paper Darts, and Bellows American Review.

Ms. Podos has also been recognized with several awards. The Helman Award for Short Fiction, the Hillerman-McGarrity Scholarship for Creative Writing, and the David Dornstein Memorial Creative Writing Prize for Young Adult Writers.

Rebecca Podos’ debut novel, The Mystery of Hollow Places, was a Junior Library Guild Selection and a Barnes & Nobel Best Young Adult Book of 2016. In addition, her novel was a 2016 nominee for an Agatha Award Best Children/Young Adult Fiction.

Ms. Podos was recognized with the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for her second novel, Like Water, for literature for LGBTQ Children’s and Young Adults’.

The Lambda Literary Awards, aka the “Lammys” are a yearly award recognizing the essential contribution LGBTQ writers promote for shaping the world for LGBTQ individuals. Started in 1989, there are currently twenty-four awards. Bisexual and transgender centered stories are two examples of the award categories given.

Ms. Podos’s debut novel, The Mystery of Hollow Places, is a thrilling young adult mystery about a 17-year-old teen. Her father, who happens to be a best-selling mystery author, suddenly is missing.

Imogene Scott figured her father left to track down her mother. Mother abandoned them when she was just a baby. Following the clues that may be ones her father left, she’s searching for them both.

Imogene’s dad wasn’t always a famous mystery author. Before he was an author of renown, before he was her dad, he was a young forensic pathologist. The night a woman came to his pathology suite, on his table, he had an experience that changed him.

It was a typical autopsy. Until he reached the heart. Instead of the typical squishy blue organ of life his hand wrapped around a stone the size of his fist. Setting it on a blue cloth, one usually used for the softer body parts, he set the stone down.

With sweaty gloved hands, he used a small chisel and rock hammer and “tink, tink, tink…”, he split the rock open. A small amount of precious crystals tumbled from the small cavity inside. That discovery changed his life.

Ms. Podos wrote a second novel that focused on the life of a Mexican-American teen. In Like Water, Savannah Espinoza is bisexual and performs as a mermaid in a theme park. It is there, she meets and then falls in love with a genderqueer teen.

Vanni is eager to graduate high school and leave her small town in New Mexico and explore the world. Encouraged by her new friend, Leigh, who has become her lover, she is looking forward to college and all the things she can do with her life.

Dreams of leaving New Mexico and her dream of attending college evaporate when her father is diagnosed with a chronic, debilitating, terminal disease. The added pressure and stress for Vanni is the unknown – she may have inherited Huntington disease like her father.

Vanni loves her family and she’s loyal to them. They have worked hard in their family business, the restaurant work is never ending. She feels obligated to stay and help her parents. Now, she’s very afraid she won’t ever be leaving New Mexico.

This novel won a 2018 Lambda Literary Award.

Ms. Podos gives us a novel that challenges time, our futures, and having enough courage to change them. The Wise and the Wicked reveals a family who, through their eyes, reveals how courageous they are.

The women of the forests of the republic of Russian Karelia are said to foretell a person’s fate. They also had the power to grant a person health and wisdom. These legendary women were said to be able to even ward off death.

Ruby’s legacy in this magical family seems to be in flux. The women have been forced to escape their Russian home to America. Ruby has only a tiny amount of power left in her blood. The tales say that when these women come of age they are given a vision of their death; a destiny inescapable and inevitable.

Aunt Polina passes away. Ruby’s great-aunt’s death doesn’t match her vision. This has never happened before and it gives Ruby and her sisters hope for a brighter future, one that hasn’t been prescribed for them, one that hasn’t been carved in history without their choosing.

Ms. Podos continues to show her range and creative talents with her novel, From Dust, A Flame. In this Jewish fantasy, we share the story of abiding love, crushing loss, and how stories can bring and keep us together when it looks as if nothing else could possibly accomplish that.

Hannah’s life has been a spinning top, one of perpetual motion. For all her memories, she and her brother have been kept on the road by their mother. A string of relationships, rental houses, and no family. Mother never offered any explanations for their nomadic life.

On Hannah’s seventeenth birthday, she’s begun a transformation, one of many that are unexpected. Today’s impossible mutation, as she looks into her mirror, she’s looking at herself with a golden eyes and knife-slit pupils.

Her mother says she knows someone who can find a cure for Hannah’s mutation. She leaves Hannah and her brother, Gabe, to search. Days turned to weeks. When their mother never returns the two siblings decide to explore and find the truth.

They discover a family and a history they were unaware of. This family is more magical, fantastical, and tragic than they could have dreamed of. A history that reaches back to their grandmother’s childhood in Prague during the Nazi occupation. Their story is one of Jewish legend and mysticism.

Hannah now has to rush to discover the family secrets and attempt to break the curse. She has to save the people she loves, as well as herself.