December 2010 On Sale: November 23, 2010 Featuring: Soledad Reyes; Jonathan Crandall 336 pages ISBN: 0312650043 EAN: 9780312650049 Paperback $9.99 Add to Wish List Young Adult Buy at Amazon.com “Carmen?” In high school? YES PLEASE! When The Stars Go Blue by Caridad Ferrer Soledad Reyes decides to dance Carmen as part of a drum and bugle corps competition, not knowing if it will help or harm her chance of becoming a professional ballet dancer but eager to pursue new options, including a romance with the boy who invited her to audition. A dancer driven to succeed. A musical prodigy attempting to escape his past. The summer they share. And the moment it all goes wrong. Dance is Soledad Reyes’s life. About to graduate from Miami’s Biscayne High School for the Performing Arts, she plans on spending her last summer at home teaching in a dance studio, saving money, and eventually auditioning for dance companies. That is, until fate intervenes in the form of fellow student Jonathan Crandall who has what sounds like an outrageous proposition: Forget teaching. Why not spend the summer performing in the intense environment of the competitive drum and bugle corps? The corps is going to be…

I love November. It kicks off with Halloween and ends with my favorite family holiday: Thanksgiving. (All the family (and food) of Christmas with none of the give-giving stress.) And this November includes some YA releases from some of my favorite authors. First up, a contemporary novel from award-winning author, Caridad Ferrer, who graciously answered my questions about her upcoming (11/23) novel, WHEN THE STARS GO BLUE. Passion, love triangle, ballet… I’m loving the premise of this book. RCM: What is WHEN THE STARS GO BLUE about? Caridad Ferrer: Essentially, it’s a contemporary reimagining of Bizet’s Carmen (i.e. Ballet & opera) where the gypsy Carmen is Soledad, a driven dancer, the straight-laced Army officer Don José in transformed into Jonathan, an intense, disciplined music prodigy, and the flamboyant bullfighter, Escamillo is now Taz, all-star Spanish soccer player. The action plays out over the course of a summer and is set primarily against the backdrop of competitive drum & bugle corps (sort of like marching band, but several orders of magnitude higher). And like in the original story, lives are changed irrevocably. RCM: What’s the significance of the title? (I love the song by the Corrs.) Caridad Ferrer: Um, because I’m…