From Dust, a Flame
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Rebecca Podos, Lambda Award-winning author of Like Water, returns with a contemporary Jewish fantasy of enduring love, unfathomable loss, and the power of stories to hold us together when it seems that nothing else can.
Hannah’s whole life has been spent in motion. Her mother has kept her and her brother, Gabe, on the road for as long as she can remember, leaving a trail of rental homes and faded relationships behind them. No roots, no family but one another, and no explanations.
All that changes on Hannah’s seventeenth birthday when she wakes up transformed, a pair of golden eyes with knife-slit pupils blinking back at her from the mirror—the first of many such impossible mutations. Promising that she knows someone who can help, her mother leaves Hannah and Gabe behind to find a cure. But as the days turn to weeks and their mother doesn’t return, they realize it’s up to them to find the truth.
What they discover is a family they never knew and a history more tragic and fantastical than Hannah could have dreamed—one that stretches back to her grandmother’s childhood in Prague under the Nazi occupation, and beyond, into the realm of Jewish mysticism and legend. As the past comes crashing into the present, Hannah must hurry to unearth their family’s secrets in order to break the curse and save the people she loves most, as well as herself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The day after turning 17, Hannah Kowalski wakes up in Jamaica Plain, Mass., with snake eyes, and the next day with wolflike fangs, too. Saying she knows a healer, her frequently peripatetic mother disappears, leaving Hannah and her older brother Gabe alone to cope with the changes. Hannah already feels like the odd one out in her family—their mother prefers theater kid Gabe, who is adopted, to biological child Hannah. But the siblings are close, and when they receive a death announcement for the grandmother they've never met, they travel to their mother's hometown in the Hudson Valley. There, they find out how little they know about her, including that her family are observant Jews. The two join forces with Ari Leydon, a local teen to whom Hannah is attracted, to investigate family history and Jewish folklore, especially golems and demons. Podos (The Wise and the Wicked) shifts between Hannah's first-person voice and a third-person narrative from the past, deftly blending Jewish fact and legend to create a tale of secrets, history, and daring with white-cued characters. The result is the rare read that may appeal equally to lovers of contemporary and fantasy novels. Ages 14–up.
