Ava and the Builder's Bond

Sixteen-year-old Ava Baker wanted a summer job that mattered. What she got was six cardboard boxes of her dad's old construction files and three weeks to make sense of them.

Baker BuildWorks is bidding on the biggest job it has ever wanted. To win it, the company needs a surety bond, a promise from someone else that the work will get done. In three weeks an underwriter decides whether a company this size can take on work this big.

The proof is eight years of photographs, schedules, and invoices sitting in Ava's living room in no particular order. Along with one job that ran late, which nobody in the office wants to talk about.

With her friends Max, Lily, and Zack, Ava builds the Trust Engine: a way to show what happened on a project, what proves it, and what still needs an answer.

But when Zack suggests scoring each project out of a hundred, the argument that follows splits the team. A single number would make a two month delay look like a failure. It would make a builder whose whole record is three photographs and a handwritten letter look like he had done nothing at all.

Now Ava has to decide what her dad's company is really worth, and whether any number can say it.

Real work, made visible.

Most people finish school without knowing surety exists. Nithila Jeyakumar is a technology leader at a global specialty insurer, and she wrote this book after her daughters asked what she actually did all day. The construction and bonding details come from that work. The story does not require any of it to be understood first.

Ava and the Builder's Bond is a novel for readers 12 and up, illustrated in full color. It closes with a discussion guide and a set of tools readers can use on a project of their own, in a classroom, a club, or a neighborhood.

Perfect for readers who love:

• Mysteries solved with evidence, not luck
• STEM storytelling with heart
• Teams who argue, listen, and figure it out
• Characters who feel like your own squad

Get ready to dig, argue, and change your mind.