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About the Book
Title: Stealing Liberty
Author: Jennifer Froelich
Genre: Young Adult
A heist so monumental,
it may cost them everything...
When Reed Paine is sent to a secret detention
school for teens whose parents are branded enemies of the state, he doesn’t
expect to find friendship – especially after coming face to face with Riley Paca,
a girl who has every reason to hate him.
But when Reed, Riley and a few others start
reading the old books they find in tunnels under the school, they begin to
question what they are taught about the last days of America and the government
that has risen in its place. Then the
government decides to sell the Liberty Bell and Reed and his friends risk
everything to steal it – to take back their history and the liberty that has
been stolen from them (Stealing Liberty/ Clean Reads).
About the Author
Jennifer Froelich
published her debut novel, Dream of Me, in late 2011, which reviewers praised
as "well-orchestrated with outstanding imagery." Her second novel, A
Place Between Breaths, published in 2014, was called "a roller-coaster
ride with enough twists and turns to keep everyone interested" and won an
Honorable Mention in Writer's Digest's 23rd Annual Self Published Book
competition. Jennifer is a frequent contributing author to Chicken Soup for the
Soul. A graduate of the Walter Cronkite
School of Journalism at Arizona State University, Jennifer worked for many
years as a freelance editor and writer before publishing her own work. She
lives in beautiful Idaho with her husband, two teenage kids, and a rescue cat
named Katniss.
Links
Book Excerpt
I’m fascinated by stories of immigrants who
came to America from all corners of the world, giving up everything just to
step foot on these shores. Just like my grandparents. I read about what they
sought. Freedom, opportunity, safety, peace.
“Give me your tired, your poor. Your huddled masses yearning to breathe
free.” It’s from a poem once displayed
at the Statue of Liberty, meant to welcome people to the land of the free, the
home of the brave. It makes me sad, thinking how different everything is now. I
glance at Adam. He’s studying a vinyl album cover, reading lyrics, I suspect.
We’re changing, every one of us, by what we read. It’s as if we have only
existed in darkness before, with one light guiding us down a fixed path. Now
we’re flooded with light, and it’s a prism, shining from a thousand angles,
giving us perspectives in colors we never imagined.
History texts call
Grandma’s generation the Lost Ones, but just in passing. Teachers talk about
them quickly, always ready to move on. But Grandma was a great storyteller,
which made sense when she finally told me about Floodlight . Grandma said people spent a lot of time
imagining the future when she was a kid. In movies, books and music, they
thought up utopias, dystopias. They wrote about technology taking over or
disappearing altogether. Most of all they imagined change. It’s not surprising. She was born during the
dawn of cell phones and cyberspace, after analog gave way to digital. When
plasma fought with LCD, then disappeared for LED, 3D and pixel paint.
Satellites crowded the atmosphere. Electronic books were born, everyone began
storing data on the cloud. Transportation engineers built the first bullet
train and laid the first mag tracks. Gaming systems mimicked movement. Robots
performed surgery and medicine got smart. Retinal grafts got to be as popular
as tattoos. The first nanochips were installed, then the first tragus implants,
allowing us to sync our data with any device we hold. Everyone looked to the future and wondered
what next?
Grandma said people rush to extremes, but
never settle on the truth. No one knew the great technological advances
characterizing the past two centuries would stagnate, too gradually to be
noticed. And the change? People celebrated it. Then they fought over what
it meant, who had the right to make it happen and who should just shut up. But
they didn’t understand. It was happening with or without their permission, and
never how they envisioned it. Like a pebble you nudge with your foot, only to
watch it roll down a hill and start an avalanche. You could have stopped the
pebble, but why would you? How could you know it would destroy a town, a city,
a nation? “We were rich and spoiled,” Grandma said, “throwing away more food
than we ate, living from one form of entertainment to the next. Offended by
everything, we grew weaker still, building bubbles around our opinions, enraged
by anyone who shared ideas not matching the most popular narrative. War and
disease caught us unprepared, which is why most of us didn’t survive.”
