Yen Press has announced the fifth title in Svetlana Chmakova’sbest-selling Berrybrook Middle School series: Enemies, which is due out in September 2022.
Like the other four books (Awkward, Brave, Crush, and Diary), Enemies will be a school drama with a large and varied cast. While many characters recur in all the books, a handful take center stage in each one. Enemies will focus on two sisters: Letty, who is something of an overachiever, and Felicity, who can’t seem to finish anything she starts. When Felicity enters a contest to show her sister up, things start to get complicated. In a statement accompanying Yen Press’s announcement, Chmakova described Enemies as a “book-shaped piece of my heart/deep love for everyone going through middle school and similar ordeals.”
The first Berrybrook book was Awkward, which was released in 2015 (see “Review: ‘Awkward’ GN”) and it won the Dwayne McDuffie Award (see “‘Awkward’ Wins McDuffie Award for Kids’ Comics”). The first three Berrybrook books have consistently debuted in the BookScan Kids Top 20, and both Awkward and Crush were nominated for Eisner Awards. Diary was a departure in terms of format, as it was a journal that interspersed writing prompts with short stories set in the Berrybrook world.
Chmakova is also the creator of The Weirn Books, a supernatural middle-grade series set in the same world as her supernatural YA series Nightschool (see “New Chmakova Graphic Novel Series Revealed”).She began her career in webcomics, back in the early days of that medium, and was one of the early TokyopopOEL (original English language) manga creators. Her series Dramaconwas a best-seller in its time (see “American Comics Crack the BookScan Top Ten”) and was nominated for an Eisner Award. A new edition came out just last year (see “Tokyopop to Release New Edition of Svetlana Chmakova’s ‘Dramacon’”) to mark its 15th anniversary.
Almost all of Chmakova’s work since then has been published by Yen Press, with whom she has had a 15-year relationship. Her Nightschool was one of Yen’s launch titles (see “Yen Press Details Launch Plans”), and she followed that up with three YA graphic novels based on James Patterson’s Witch and Wizard novels.
Her most recent release is The Weirn Books, Vol. 1: Be Wary of the Silent Woods, and she has said that there are more volumes of that series in the works.
Source: ICV2
