A Box of Bones
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Twelve-year-old Kallie despises nonsense. She believes there’s a rational explanation for everything, despite the good-natured prodding of her Grandpa Jess, who takes her to frivolous wastes of time like their town’s local Festival of Fools.
There, Kallie meets a faceless man (must be some kind of mask) who gives her a strange wooden puzzle box (must be some kind of gimmick). Intrigued despite herself, Kallie sets to work on unlocking its secrets and…lets something out. From here Kallie’s life begins to entangle with another world, a world where Liah, a young bone carver, journeys with her master to sell wares to a wicked Queen.
The sights, sounds, smells, and spells of Liah’s world are beginning to leak into Kallie’s, and if Kallie can’t decipher the meaning of her own story, “the end” might be far from happy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this magic-laden story of family secrets and emotional growth, 12-year-old Kallie lives in Vermont with her stern father and gentle, accommodating Grandpa Jess following the drowning death of her mother, a writer. A lover of logic, order, and routine, Kallie abhors the kind of uncertainty found in stories. But life takes a mysterious turn when a faceless costumed figure at the town's Festival of Fools hands her a wooden puzzle box. Inside, she finds seemingly enchanted picture dice made from bone, which begin to serve as powerful portents of her present and future. Cohen integrates chapters of a fantasy story, narrated by a bone carver's apprentice, that Kallie is writing herself for a school project. As the girl explores her creativity, she becomes better able to accept that some truths such as what really happened to her mother are not always so cut and dried. Kallie's rigid, aloof nature obscures her vulnerability a bit too well, but Cohen thematically ties the storytelling elements together to create a compelling portrait of Kallie's grief and her struggle to understand herself. Ages 8 11.
