Disney Defenders Unite!

Melissa de la Cruz is the New York Times and USA Today best-selling author of many critically acclaimed and award-winning novels for teens including The Au Pairs series, the Blue Bloods series, the Ashleys series, Angels on Sunset Boulevard, Girl Stays in the Picture, and the semi-autobiographical novel Fresh off the Boat. Her books for adults include the novel Cat's Meow, the anthology Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys and the tongue-in-chic handbooks How to Become Famous in Two Weeks or Less and The Fashionista Files: Adventures in Four-inch heels and Faux-Pas, and the Witches of East End series. She has worked as a fashion and beauty editor and has written for many publications including the New York Times, Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar, Glamour, among others. She has also appeared as an expert on fashion, trends and fame for CNN, E! and FoxNews. Disney lover and fairy-tales fans will enjoy her latest adventure for middle-schoolers, The Isle of the Lost: A Descendants Novel (Disney-Hyperion), in which all the evil villains of Disney movie fame have been exiled to the Isle of the Lost.

Ridley Pearson is the award-winning author of multiple adventure series for (young-ish) readers, including The Kingdom Keepers, Steel Trapp, and with Dave Barry, Peter and the Starcatchers. Ridley is also a best-selling crime novelist of more than 25 titles. Pearson was the first U.S. citizen to be awarded the Raymond Chandler/Fulbright Fellowship in Detective Fiction at Oxford University. The latest installment of Pearson’s Kingdom Keepers series about a group of five teenagers who protect Disneyland from villains is Kingdom Keepers: The Return Book One Disney Lands (Disney-Hyperion). With the defeat of the Overtakers behind them, the five teenagers known as the Kingdom Keepers should be celebrating. By all accounts they saved Disneyland from certain destruction. Why then did their mentor leave one last puzzle for them to decipher? The Keepers must solve a puzzle of the past, or be crushed under an evil that makes the Overtakers seem like gentle souls.