I'm super excited to be hosting a stop on the book tour for The Assassin's Guide for Babysitting, hosted by Colored Pages Book Tours!
This book came out on January 7th, so you can read it now!
This riveting, superpowered adventure unveils a shadow world of Talented bounty hunters—and plumbs the nature of identity, deadly secrets, and found family.
Tru has been hiding all her life. Her parents taught her to conceal her bastion Talent: indestructible skin, muscles, and bones. In a world where Talents are common and varied, no one trusts a bastion—they’re too powerful.
Hiding failed to keep Tru’s parents alive, but moments before their murder, Tru’s mom pointed her to Logan Dire, a famed recluse assassin who adopted and trained orphaned Tru. And at seventeen, she’s still hiding. Not even her closest friends know her true name or Talent, or that she’s balancing high school with knife and stealth training (while crushing on her BFF’s older sister).
When assassins interrupt a mundane babysitting job booked through BountyApp—where lethal hunters find work and babysitters for their kids—Tru flees with a one-year-old strapped to her chest and spiraling questions: Who killed her parents? Whom can she trust? What does it mean to be a bastion? And is it ever OK to kiss a girl who’s trying to hunt you down?
From an award-winning author comes a masterfully plotted thriller that holds character and relationship on a par with action and nail-biting suspense
In one word—delightful! The Assassin’s Guide to Babysitting is the superhero/villain lesbian sci-fi book I had no idea I needed, but I’m so profoundly glad that I got the chance to read it. If you loved Not Your Sidekick or Renegades, you have to check this one out immediately—I’ll be recommending this book for years to come!
Tru is a truly fantastic protagonist. Whether mourning, pining, plotting, or fighting, she has a sharp, witty voice that propels the story at a fast pace and a caring heart that made me fall in love with her and this story from page one. Parker is truly a master at crafting well-drawn and relatable characters in even the most minute details, and Tru is exactly that, made even more multidimensional by the relationships she has with the supporting cast. This book has both a brilliant friend group and one of the most caring father-daughter relationships I’ve read in years,
There are plenty of books starring supervillains or superheroes, but The Assassin’s Guide to Babysitting makes every detail feel new through its madcap execution and brilliant twists. Whatever impression of this book you have from the title is spot-on—Parker throws together the most unlikely scenarios and pulls them off with commendable ease, making even the most outrageous scenarios as natural and believable as Tru’s love of baking. The sheer normalcy and bureaucracy associated with superpowers was spot-on, and though this was a pitch-perfect standalone, I found myself wishing for a sequel to spend more time with these characters and world.
I can’t recommend The Assassin’s Guide to Babysitting highly enough—five extremely well-deserved stars!
Special thanks to Colored Pages Book Tours and Candlewick Press for the gifted copy of The Assassin’s Guide to Babysitting! All opinions expressed here are my own.
Website | Goodreads | Instagram | X