The Alienation of Courtney Hoffman

Book excerpt: Fifteen-year-old Courtney wants to be normal like her friends. But there’s something frighteningly different about her—and it’s not just the mysterious tattoo her conspiracy-obsessed grandfather marked her with when she was a child. The last thing Courtney wants to do is end up crazy and dead like her grandfather—but what about the tattoo? And the alien scouts who visit Courtney in her bedroom at night, claiming to have shared an alliance with her grandfather? With her new friend Agatha’s apocalyptic visions, Courtney begins connecting the dots between the past, present, and future—of her bloodline, and the ancient history that surrounds it. So is she going mentally insane, like her family claimed her grandfather did, or is she actually a “chosen one” with ancestral connections to another world? Either way, Courtney has a mission: untangle her past, discover the truth, and stop the apocalypse before anyone from school finds out she’s missing.