The Rat Queen
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
From National Book Award winner Pete Hautman comes a mysterious modern-day fairy tale about developing a moral compass—and the slippery nature of conscience. For Annie’s tenth birthday, her papa gives her a pad of paper, some colored pencils, and the Klimas family secret. It’s called the nuodeema burna, or eater of sins. Every time Annie misbehaves, she has to write down her transgression and stick the paper into a hidey-hole in the floor of their house. But Annie’s inheritance has a dark side: with each paper fed to the burna, she feels less guilty about the mean things she says and does. As a plague of rats threatens her small suburban town and the mystery of her birthright grows, Annie—caught in a cycle of purging her misdeeds—begins to stop growing. It is only when she travels to her family’s home country of Litvania to learn more about the burna that Annie uncovers the magnitude of the truth. Gripping and emotionally complex, Pete Hautman’s inventive yarn for middle-grade readers draws on magical realism to explore coming of age and the path to moral responsibility.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This folktale-based mystery from Hautman (Road Tripped) centers Annike "Annie" Klimas, raised by her single father, who, along with the housekeeper who homeschools her, hails from the Queendom of Litvania—a tiny Baltic country that others insist doesn't exist. When her landlord father comes home each day, he appears old and haggard, but emerges mysteriously young and vibrant from his tower study only an hour later. On Annie's 10th birthday—"the age of the conscience, when bad things begin to eat at your soul"—her father reveals a magic cure for guilt. To wash away such feelings, Annie must only write down her regrets and feed the papers into the household's secret nuodeema burna—the eater of sins. But Annie dislikes the way this action seems to stop her growing, and as she becomes increasingly frustrated by being kept out of school and losing a best friend, she begins puzzling over a neighborhood rat infestation that her father seems intent on feeding. It takes a trip to Litvania for Annie to find answers in this intricately plotted, atmospherically sinister novel that interweaves portentous Litvanian fairy tales with intriguing, white-cued modern-day characters. Ages 9–12.
