The Empty Place
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A powerful and imaginative story about a girl fighting to find her way back home from a mind-bending land of the lost.
When Henry’s father goes missing in the forest on her tenth birthday, her entire world shatters. The last thing she expects is for him to emerge from the trees exactly one year later, unharmed and bearing a gift for her—a strange necklace.
Everyone says her father’s reappearance is a miracle, but Henry wants real answers to her questions. Where did her father go? How did he get back? And what’s the truth behind his gift?
Wearing the necklace and carrying only a simple map, Henry enters the same forest that swallowed her father. But beyond the trees, she finds a world more incredible and dangerous than she ever imagined. It’s a place for all who are lost, and there’s no clear method of escape. As Henry follows in her father’s footsteps and searches for a way home, she discovers that the truth she’s seeking isn’t as simple as she hoped, and if she wants to leave this world, she’ll have to be braver than she’s ever been.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A year after mysteriously vanishing into the woods near their home, white-cued Henrietta "Henry" Lightfoot's explorer father unexpectedly returns on her 12th birthday. He claims to have "found the land of Truth" and gives her a strange map and silver necklace. Determined to understand his compulsive wanderlust and to find out more about where he disappeared to, Henry follows his footsteps into the forest. She soon falls into This Place, an alternate world filled with lost people, creatures, and objects—and quickly learns that there's no guaranteed way home. Now Henry must retrace her dad's travels in This Place if she hopes to recreate his miraculous escape. Accompanied by two fellow lost children, Henry delves into This Place's increasingly hazardous nooks and crannies, uncovering mysteries and testing her own limits. In a dreamlike portal fantasy, Cole (Where the Lockwood Grows) examines the nature of home and what it means to be lost. Henry's drive to be "not an earthworm anymore, but a butterfly" like her father is a powerful sentiment that thoughtfully coincides with further interpretations of how to respect one's surroundings, even as one steps off the established path. Ages 8–12.
