Eight kids nobody trusted. One abandoned room. Secrets the school was hiding.
At Mariah Wilson Public School, an underfunded K-12 school in Times Square, eight students were sent to a forgotten classroom nicknamed Solitaria after a week of hacked grades, viral games, AI-generated humiliation, secret parties, and anonymous accounts that threatened expulsions, arrests, and futures.
They weren't friends. Jamie, a child prodigy who preferred hacking to homework, hid inside code. Dev built worlds he couldn't control. Nia believed every broken system could be fixed. Leo grieved a father no one could replace. David turned life into notes. Sami laughed before anyone asked. Antoni performed a self he barely understood. Patty turned popularity into a weapon. They were a collision of misfit teenagers nobody wanted anywhere else.
One adult stood between them and juvenile detention. Their advisor, Dr. Miryam, convinced the administration to try her Experiment 359, a thirty-day plan whose outcome even she doubted, watching them through security cameras from a secret monitoring room.
Only, Solitaria didn't give anyone the answer they wanted. It gave the eight the trail of an unsolved death on school grounds, stolen funds, lies, threats, and adults who would rather bury the truth than face it. What began as classroom drama turned into a classroom mystery; what looked like detention became a crime story nobody signed up for.
The trail led somewhere uncomfortable: the students were not the only ones on trial. Behind their punishment stood a secret-keeping school, crumbling from the inside. The kids had arrived carrying what teens actually carry nowadays: cyberbullying, social anxiety, guilt, grief, even terminal illness. They were paying the price of growing up in two worlds, the online and the offline, without understanding what the digital age gives and takes.
Then something happened that no adult predicted. Locked in one room with nobody left to perform for, the eight began doing what the grown-ups around them could not: organize, forgive, build, confess, protect, connect. Eight isolated teens became a hidden network of belonging, acceptance, teamwork, and endurance. An accidental tribe.
A funny, sharp, illustrated coming-of-age mystery set in New York City, Accidental Tribes by best-selling author Candice S. Pascoal (pen name C.S. Pascoal) is the school story rewritten for the modern digital age: a literary crime whodunit about found family, friendship, identity, and purpose, where artificial intelligence, social media, technology, and digital threats collide with adolescence, self-discovery, maturity, forgiveness, and the life lessons no one planned to teach. For young adult readers 13 to 18, reluctant readers very much included.