About J. Anderson Coats
J. Anderson Coats has received three Junior Library Guild awards, won two Washington State Book awards, and earned starred reviews from Kirkus, School Library Journal, the Horn Book Review, and Shelf Awareness. Her newest books are A Season Most Unfair, a middle grade historical set in medieval England about a girl with something to prove; and The Night Ride, a middle grade action-adventure about horses in danger and kids who want to save them – if they can.
The Wicked and The Just was one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Teen Books of 2012 and won the Washington State Book Award for Young Adults. She is also the author of The Many Reflections of Miss Jane Deming, a middle-grade novel set in Washington Territory in the 1860s which won the 2018 Washington State Book Award for Middle Grade, as well as being a 2017 Junior Library Guild selection and one of Kirkus’s Best Historical Middle Grade Books of 2017.
She is also the author of R is for Rebel, which Booklist called “an empowering and timely story about resistance,” and The Green Children of Woolpit, which the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books described as “precise, distinctive, and very beautiful.” Spindle and Dagger, which School Library Journal described as “powerful, heartbreaking, and suspenseful […] must-read historical fiction,” was a finalist for the 2020 Washington State Book Award for Young Adults. J. Anderson Coats lives and works as a librarian near Seattle.
The Loss of the Burying Ground came into being kind of by accident.
In January 2021, things in my world – and the larger world – felt a little bleak. I wanted to write something purely for fun, so I opened a new blank document and out came a few lines about a castaway. Someone who’d survived a shipwreck and found herself washed up on a beach. And of course if you have shipwrecks and castaways, you’ve got to have pirates.
Pirates and castaways are fun, right?
Since then the story has evolved, as stories do. There are still pirates. There are still castaways. But now there’s a long-running war, a peace treaty with high stakes, two girls who are each convinced they know who the enemy is, and the idea that maybe – just maybe – none of these things are entirely as they seem.
Cover design by Martha Kennedy, Cover art by Jeff Langevin
Title The Loss of the Burying Ground
Authors J. Anderson Coats
Target Audience Young Adult
Publication Date September 3rd 2024 by Candlewick
Find It On Goodreads ● Amazon ● Chapters ● Blackwell’s ● Barnes & Noble ● IndieBound
When the Burying Ground goes down in neutral waters, it sends the delegations from two warring nations — and the peace treaty they were about to sign — to the bottom of the ocean. The only survivors are a pair of teen girls: Cora, daughter of a Duran newspaper man, and Vivienne, lady’s maid to an Ariminthian princess. Neither has known a time when war between their two countries did not rage, but now they must learn to trust each other if they are to find sustenance, avoid dangerous pirates, and have any hope of rescue from the remote island they washed up on. However, in the midst of a conflict steeped in fierce national identity, propaganda, disinformation, and radicalization, finding a common path forward seems nearly impossible, for both Cora and Vivienne and their respective countries. But when the teens’ politically charged rescue seems likely to extend the war, Cora and Vivienne realize they do have a shared purpose: peace. If only it isn’t too late.
