Riverland
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
When things go bad at home, sisters Eleanor and Mike hide in a secret place under Eleanor’s bed, telling monster stories. Often, it seems those stories and their mother’s house magic are all that keep them safe from both busybodies and their dad’s temper. But when their father breaks a family heirloom, a glass witch ball, a river suddenly appears beneath the bed, and Eleanor and Mike fall into a world where dreams are born, nightmares struggle to break into the real world, and secrets have big consequences. Full of both adventure and heart, Riverland is a story about the bond between two sisters and how they must make their own magic to protect each other and save the ones they love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wilde (Updraft) skillfully blurs the lines of fantasy and reality in a haunting middle grade story of sisters connected through trauma and a shared mythology. Middle schooler Eleanor and her little sister, Mary ("Mike"), have long believed in house magic a force that sweeps away the shards of objects broken in anger and returns the home to a semblance of normal. But one night, a river appears in the girls' bedroom, and both are swallowed into a watery dreamworld of anthropomorphic creatures, including a talking heron, nightmarish equines, and a terrifying snake woman. But as sinister as elements of Riverland are, the world they are most in need of escaping is the one where they should feel the most safe. When the girls' mother, wearing dark glasses to conceal her bruises, takes them to their estranged grandmother's house, the sisters believe that their attentive relative may share their connection to Riverland, as well as the girls' sense of obligation to keep the nightmares from spilling into the waking world. Beneath the surface of Wilde's fantastical, if at times muddied, metaphors lies the far more chilling and profound portrayal of domestic abuse and the lengths to which people can go to deny the most painful of truths. Ages 10 14.
