The Art Thieves

Nnedi Okorafor meets Angeline Boulley in this gripping story of hope (and time travel!) amid climate collapse

BEST OF THE YEAR: Shelf Awareness * Cooperative Children's Book Center 

TO: Angel Wilson ([email protected])

FROM: Stevie Henry ([email protected])

Thanks for coming to see me; but by the time you read this, it will be too late. No one will have started to panic, yet; but in less than two months nothing will be the same. What came first, The Chicken or the Egg Flu? I wish it mattered. But let’s just say, maybe go back to wearing a mask, bathing in sanitizer, and avoid birds and eggs for a bit…

I did not kill my brother. I did quite the opposite, really.


It’s the year 2052. Stevie Henry is a Cherokee girl working at a museum in Texas, trying to save up enough money to go to college. The world around her is in a cycle of drought and superstorms, ice and fire … but people get by. But it’s about to get a whole lot worse.

When a mysterious boy shows up at Stevie’s museum saying that he’s from the future -- and telling her what is to come -- she refuses to believe him. But soon she will have no choice.

From the author of the Walter Award-winning Man Made Monsters comes a YA novel that conjures our futures in startling life – the ones that we are headed towards, and the ones we can still work towards.


P R A I S E

"The Art Thieves is a book that is both exciting to read and deeply thoughtful about our reality as well as the larger literary landscape of post-apocalyptic fiction. I couldn’t put it down, and as soon as I finished reading, I wanted to find something else like it. I even found myself hoping that Rogers might be working on a series. The Art Thieves is reminiscent of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and is in conversation with Afrofuturism more broadly." 
—Southern Review of Books

★ “Rogers employs smart and empathetic prose to present a realistically rendered science fiction tale that is at once adrenaline-pumping and emotionally moving. In this gripping adventure, Rogers considers the future of Indigenous heritage via an indomitable protagonist who, alongside a plethora of memorably realized characters, navigates tough issues relating to death, familial turmoil, exploitation, and climate collapse.” 
—Publishers Weekly (starred)

★ “A stirring story about choosing to create a new future when disaster seems inevitable Rogers's sophomore YA novel skillfully discusses the current affairs, pop culture, and climate-change related extreme weather events of the future and powerfully relates them to historical and contemporary legacies of racism and oppression.... Award-winning author Andrea L. Rogers paints a stunning picture of what it means to hope for a better future and the strength it might take to make that future real.”
—Shelf-Awareness (starred)

“Sharp social commentary folded into an all-too-believable dystopian setting.” 
—Kirkus