This image is the cover for the book Willie Bea and the Time the Martians Landed

Willie Bea and the Time the Martians Landed

An American Library Association Notable Book: In rural Ohio in 1938, twelve-year-old Willie Bea prepares for Halloween—and an alien invasion!

Halloween is Willie Bea’s favorite holiday. Her relatives always visit, and everyone cooks, bakes, and tells stories. Best of all, the kids get to dress in costume and go trick-or-treating. But this Halloween is different. When Willie’s glamorous aunt Leah, who reads palms and wears sweet-smelling perfume, hears on the radio that aliens are coming to Earth, the entire family is petrified. Will the aliens come to their small Ohio town? What will they do when they arrive?

Inspired by Orson Welles’s historic War of the Worlds radio broadcast, which terrified people across the country, Newbery and Coretta Scott King Award winner Virginia Hamilton tells a gripping, imaginative, and humorous story about a Depression-era family on their day of reckoning.

Virginia Hamilton

Virginia Hamilton (1934–2002) was the author of over forty books for children, young adults, and their older allies. Throughout a career that spanned four decades, Hamilton earned numerous accolades for her work, including nearly every major award available to writers of youth literature. In 1974, M.C. Higgins, the Great earned Hamilton the National Book Award, the Newbery Medal (which she was the first African-American author to receive), and the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, three of the field’s most prestigious awards. She received the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest international recognition bestowed on a writer of books for young readers, in 1992, and in 1995 became the first children’s book author to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, or “Genius Award.” She was also the recipient of the Coretta Scott King Award.


Open Road Integrated Media