Reading · The Scuttlebutt

Dear Scuttlebutt readers,

I’ve always been excited to share my new work with you, and I’ve never played favorites when it comes to my books… but at the risk of giving away my true feelings, I’ll admit that I’m especially excited to tell you about my upcoming novel, The Tinkerers, coming from Candlewick Press this fall.

This book is close to my heart, and I hope it’ll be close to yours, too. It’s got magic, if you like that sort of thing. It’s set in the mountains, mostly, and in the night sky. It’s about starstuff and hot chocolate and friendship and spies and folktales. It’s told in documents, which I think is good news for all of you who liked the documents in the Very Nearly Honorable League of Pirates books. It’s got some funny parts, and maybe some parts that’ll make you cry—but only for a minute, I promise. And it’s full of everything I know about what it’s like to be an anxious kid in an uncertain world and how we might go about helping each other through that world, magic or not. I wrote this story for my childhood self and for lots of the kids (and adults) I know and love today. It’s the most complex book I’ve worked on, it’s the one I’m most proud of, and I can’t wait for you to read it.

The cover of The Tinkerers was designed by Lissi Erwin and illustrated by the incomparable Junyi Wu. It’s a spectacular, take-your-breath-away piece of art, and I particularly love it because Junyi has taken tremendous care to include a lot of small details from the story in the image. Here’s what the front of the book will look like:

And here’s the flap copy to tell you a little more about the story:

The astromancers in Peter’s star-touched village have an amazing device that nudges time—surely it wouldn’t hurt if Peter used it to fix a few mistakes? Cozy fantasy alight with wonder from the author of Wicked Marigold.
When Peter leads two Tinkerers to his family’s inn in Stargazers Valley, he imagines they’re like other astromancers, researchers from the Imperial College who study starstuff. The valley is a special place, where the magical aurora called the Skeins appear in the sky and starstuff falls in their wake, as thin and wispy as fluff from a seed pod. But starstuff is powerful, and astromancers are the only people allowed to handle it—a law enforced by the strict and stealthy Outbounder Task Force. When Peter discovers the Tinkerers have used starstuff to invent an incredible not-a-clock that can turn back time for a few minutes, he realizes it’s his chance to undo his mistakes: if he can go back and put away his new boots, he doesn’t need to add their destruction by falcons to his list of ten worst mistakes (#7: stepping on a star-eating newt). But while using the not-a-clock is easy, stopping using it is hard. And maybe not everything that feels like a mistake at the time actually is. Family, friendship, and budding self-confidence are at the heart of Caroline Carlson’s stellar fantasy.

The Tinkerers will be in stores on October 7th, 2025, but it’s available to pre-order now from your local indie, Bookshop, Amazon, B&N, or wherever you love to buy books. You can also add it on Goodreads if you’d like.

Over the next several months, I’m hoping to share some behind-the-scenes glimpses of my writing process for The Tinkerers here in this newsletter, so keep an eye out for those messages if you’re interested in seeing the piles of notes I had to take in order to keep all my story elements straight. And if there’s anything in particular you’d like to know about the book, please ask! (You can post a comment using the button below.) I’d love to answer your questions.

Introducing THE TINKERERS

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