Death's Country
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Lakelore meets “Orpheus and Eurydice” when two Miami teens travel to the underworld to retrieve their girlfriend’s soul.
Andres Santos of São Paulo was all swinging fists and firecracker fury, a foot soldier in the war between his parents, until he drowned in the Tietê River… and made a bargain with Death for a new life. A year later, his parents have relocated the family to Miami, but their promises of a fresh start quickly dissolve in the summer heat.
Instead of fists, Andres now uses music to escape his parents’ battles. While wandering Miami Beach, he meets two girls: photographer Renee, a blaze of fire, and dancer Liora, a ray of sunshine. The three become a polyamorous triad, happy, despite how no one understands their relationship. But when a car accident leaves Liora in a coma, Andres and Renee are shattered.
Then Renee proposes a radical solution: She and Andres must go into the underworld to retrieve their girlfriend’s spirit and reunite it with her body—before it’s too late. Their search takes them to the City of the dead, where painters bleed color, songs grow flowers, and regretful souls will do anything to forget their lives on earth. But finding Liora’s spirit is only the first step in returning to the living world. Because when Andres drowned, he left a part of himself in the underworld—a part he’s in no hurry to meet again. But it is eager to be reunited with him...
In verse as vibrant as the Miami skyline, critically acclaimed author R.M. Romero has crafted a masterpiece of magical realism and an openhearted ode to the nature of healing.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brazilian 16-year-old Andres Santos loves his new life in Miami Beach, where he makes music instead of picking fights, can escape his parents' arguing now that they're divorced, and can forget the life-saving bargain he made with Death after a drowning accident. Most exciting, however, is his budding friendship-turned-romance with Renee and Liora, the "mermaid girls" he met on the beach. After Liora is hit by a car and lies comatose in the hospital, Renee hatches a radical plan: she and Andres will go to the Underworld to save their girlfriend. Though he's uneasy about his previous bargain, Andres agrees, and the duo venture into a vivid purgatory full of ambivalent and malevolent specters and animal spirit guides to face the mysterious Prince in the dark who holds the key to Liora's freedom. Employing action-oriented and descriptive verse ("Sorrow stole the stars above it/ and the streets are paved with tears"), Romero (A Warning About Swans) pulls loosely from Dante's Inferno as well as Latinx, Judaic, Greek, and Afro-Caribbean mythologies to craft this surreal queer polyamorous love story. Renee cues as Latinx and Liora reads as white. Ages 14–up.