Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
“I loved every speck of it.” —Kelly Barnhill, Newbery Medal–winning author of The Girl Who Drank the Moon
From New York Times bestselling author Catherynne M. Valente comes an inventive middle grade fantasy that follows a boy journeying away from the only home he’s ever known and into the magical realm of the dead to fulfill a bargain for his people.
Osmo Unknown hungers for the world beyond his small town. With the life that Littlebridge society has planned for him, the only taste Osmo will ever get are his visits to the edge of the Fourpenny Woods where his mother hunts. Until the unthinkable happens: his mother accidentally kills a Quidnunk, a fearsome and intelligent creature that lives deep in the forest.
None of this should have anything to do with poor Osmo, except that a strange treaty was once formed between the Quidnunx and the people of Littlebridge to ensure that neither group would harm the other. Now that a Quidnunk is dead, as the firstborn child of the hunter who killed her, Osmo must embark on a quest to find the Eightpenny Woods—the mysterious kingdom where all wild forest creatures go when they die—and make amends.
Accompanied by a very rude half-badger, half-wombat named Bonk and an antisocial pangolin girl called Never, it will take all of Osmo’s bravery and cleverness to survive the magic of the Eightpenny Woods to save his town…and make it out alive.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Twining familiar folk and myth elements with an arch, quippy voice that welcomes the reader as co-conspirator, Valente (The Glass Town Game) conjures an underworld odyssey that "must be kept secret." For countless decades after a Forest and Valley fall in love, then quarrel, the human inhabitants of Littlebridge village and the forest-dwelling Quidnunx have avoided deadly conflict through a tenuous treaty. But years after the Quidnunx have begun to fade into legend, the hunter mother of hazel-eyed, black-haired Osmo Unknown, 13, unwittingly breaks the treaty by killing a Quidnunk; as a result, Osmo is given to the forest as bridegroom to the dead being's ghost. Journeying through the Quidnunk afterlife in the grudging company of an acerbic skunk/badger/wombat and a defiantly lonesome, copper-scaled girl/pangolin, Osmo uncovers the roots of enmity in the region while trying to restore peace. Wordplay-dense prose and a languid pace underpin a singular, if self-aware, world filled with memorable chimeric creations exploring the impact of generational trauma. Final art not seen by PW. Ages 8–12.
