WordServe July News 2024

One benefit of summer is that we have more light to read by.

Our highlights below include new releases, contracts signed, notable reviews and PR events, new authors to the agency and other news of note by clients and agents.

New Releases

Congratulations to Kelsey Scism and Bethany House Publishers for the July 31, 2024 release of One Year with Jesus: A Weekly Devotional Journal for Middle School Girls.

Every girl’s guide to discovering who you truly are in Jesus

Being a middle school girl is . . . a lot. It seems like every day presents a new challenge as you navigate friendship, crushes, girl drama, stress, school, and confusing emotions.

One Year with Jesus is your guide for dealing with the stuff that life is throwing at you right now. Think of this devotional journal as a safe space where you can get real with God–and where God can bring you the peace and comfort you need.

Inside this book you’ll find:

· 52 devotions to help you apply God’s Word when life gets messy–one for every week of the year
· Reflection questions to help you grow closer to Jesus
· Journaling space so you can be honest with God about how you feel

These early teen years can be really hard–but they can also be really beautiful. Because it’s here that God shapes the girl you once were into the woman he created you to be.

Congratulations to Christopher Izant and Diversion Books for the August 13, 2024 release of Final Engagement: A Marine’s Last Mission and the Surrender of Afghanistan.

Through a deadly last showdown beside Afghan forces fighting the Taliban, Marine Corps veteran Christopher Izant illustrates the impossible conditions and strategic blunders that disillusioned a generation of American warriors and all but guaranteed defeat.

They were stepping into a world of hidden minefields, cultural clashes, “green-on-blue” insider attacks, and a patient, relentless enemy. But Christopher Izant and the Marines on his team volunteered to train and fight alongside the Afghan National Security Forces despite the risks and a seemingly futile mission they would term “advise and abandon” made by policymakers a world away.

Final Engagement embeds readers with then-Lieutenant Izant and his team of combat advisors at Combat Outpost Taghaz during one of Operation Enduring Freedom’s most crucial and challenging campaigns. It was 2012, southern Helmand Province, and with fixed base-closure and withdrawal timelines, the Marines had only six months to sustain the hard-won victories of the infantry units and prepare the Afghan Border Police to stand on their own. But before Border Advisory Team 1 lay down arms, there would be one last deadly battle with a devastating aftermath.

Izant relives a fight in the Afghan borderlands that forebode the fall of Kabul nearly a decade later and confronts the violence and anguish that transformed a generation of American and Afghan warriors from idealist volunteers for a just war to disillusioned veterans of a lost cause.

Contracts

Angela Herrington signed with Broadleaf Books for the December 2025 release of Beware the Old Witch in the Woods.

Lisa Colón DeLay signed with Broadleaf Books for the February 2026 release of Enticed.