Everything At Once

He can fix almost anything. He can't fix his sister.

Remi Alvarez pulls ruined clothes out of the incinerator lots and stitches them back into something worth wearing. Torn seams, blown zippers, a coat somebody left for dead behind the lot on Fifth - give him an hour and a needle and he'll send it back into the world better than it started.

His sister Nico is fourteen, and she's doing great, actually. Sleeping through the night for the first time in years. Calm. Easy. She can still describe their grandmother's windowsill in perfect detail - the jars, the cracked one she wouldn't throw out, the green soap.

She just doesn't feel anything when she does.

Behind a welded door beneath an abandoned shopping mall, Remi finds what's been quietly taking the weight out of an entire generation. It doesn't threaten anyone. It doesn't lie - it can't. It only offers the one thing you've secretly wanted since you were old enough to be tired: you could put this down.

Everyone Remi loves is going to be offered that deal. Some of them are going to say yes. And the only way to bring anybody back is to hand them everything they set down - the good and the unbearable, together, all of it, at once.

Everything At Once is a novel about fast fashion, memory, chosen family, and the daily, exhausting, entirely irrational work of caring about things - for readers of Neal Shusterman, M.T. Anderson's Feed, and Jason Reynolds.

Includes an author's note on the real fast-fashion crisis, and four stitches anyone can learn.

Age range: 13-18
Grade range: 8-12

Content advisories for the description or your site: grief, bereavement, references to a past mental-health crisis, depiction of a character's psychological flattening, discussion of exploitative labor. No sexual content, no on-page violence, minimal profanity.