Preorder for mystery and intrigue.
Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls, Rowana Miller’s debut YA thriller, is forthcoming October 7th, 2025 from Sourcebooks Fire.
“Secrets of the Blue Hand Girls is a sharp, enthralling thriller full of high-stakes energy and complicated girls who cannot be trusted, all tangled with healthy doses of danger, love, heartbreak, and inevitable murder. This debut crackles with electricity and will keep you guessing until the daring end.”
—Nova Ren Suma, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Walls Around Us
and Wake the Wild Creatures
When the first letter appears in Kay Anderson's locker, it carries one instruction: dye your hand blue.
She definitely shouldn't follow it. Kay doesn't have time for secret societies: as a scholarship student at up-and-coming Manhattan prep school Davison High, she knows her job is to work hard, get into Northwestern, and ignore her wealthy classmates' fun-filled Instagram stories. Besides, her first and only real friend at Davison died suddenly two years ago.
Still, Kay's intrigued, so she stains her palms with ink to join the mysterious Blue Hand Girls, sharing an unspoken thrill with the classmates who do the same. More letters show up, assigning risky initiation tasks, and Kay realizes the group is set on exposing the shady business that Davison's founders would rather keep hidden―things that her dead friend might have known about.
But the anonymous instructions also demand the girls reveal their own secrets, bonding them all too close to abandon the society. Soon Kay doesn't know who's more dangerous: the powerful people who run her school, or the Blue Hand Girls themselves. And then there's Zola Wolfe, the beautiful redhead in Kay's Calculus class, who's never been seen with a blue hand, and who just might become her girlfriend. Yet Kay can't help but wonder, even as she kisses her on the roof of Davison High, if Zola is the most dangerous of them all.
Rowana Miller writes about riddles, goblins, secrets, strange girls, and mischief. She is also the founder and Executive Director of Cosmic Writers, a nonprofit that provides creative writing education for kids and teenagers. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, she lives in New York City with her wife, Penelope, and two cats, Alice and Jabberwocky. She is represented by Amelia Appel of TriadaUS Literary Agency.
As a side quest, Rowana assists fictional necronewt Groxylzik with a Substack-based advice column for magical creatures. If you’d like to keep up with the issues of the supernatural beings who occupy the underbelly of New York, subscribe here.
Contact Rowana at rmiller@cosmicwriters.org.