Tag Archives: kali wallace

Read This!: THE SECRETS OF UNDERHILL by Kali Wallace

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The Secrets of UnderhillThe Secrets of Underhill by Kali Wallace
Summary: Nick Sixsmith has spent her whole life on the road. The daughter of a traveling arborist, she and her mother move from town to town, caring for the ironwood groves the communities rely upon. When a dangerous blight takes hold of these magical trees, they must journey to the city of Mistwood—her mother’s hometown—for answers.  Nick can’t wait to explore the prosperous city of Mistwood and all it has to the bustling markets and workshops, neighborhoods built under a roaring waterfall, and the vast ancestral grove of ironwood trees. But dark secrets simmer beneath the surface as people start to disappear, and tensions rise in the city.  As the mystery grows, Nick and her new friends must follow the trail where it leads underground, to a strange, enchanting world called Underhill. Only then, among the roots of ancestral grove, will Nick find a way to save her new home and the ironwood trees.

Another instant-classic middle grade fantasy from Kali Wallace. As in her previous middle grade novels Hunters of the Lost City and City of Islands, Wallace creates a world here that feels both timeless and utterly of its own moment, filled with achingly detailed characters confronting the challenges of their own time and yet providing insight on issues plaguing our modern world. In The Secrets of Underhill, the focus is on how people coexist with their environment, and what happens when greed outweighs human lives. As Nick helps her mother explore the cause of the mysterious blight affecting magical ironwood groves everywhere, she also confronts family secrets and her own fears. A bighearted story celebrating family ties, the power of nature, and the value of standing up for what’s right.

THE SECRETS OF UNDERHILL is out now.

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Read This!: CITY OF ISLANDS by Kali Wallace

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City of IslandsCity of Islands by Kali Wallace

Summary: In a foggy archipelago called the City of Islands, magic drifts on the air as songs. Twelve-year-old Mara has always been fascinated by the spell-songs and dreams of becoming a great mage. Orphaned as a little girl, Mara was taken in by a bone-mage called Bindy. But when Bindy was killed by a rival, Mara lost both her home and her best chance to learn magic. Now Mara is a servant for the powerful Lady of the Tides. She earns her keep by diving in the murky ocean, searching for magical treasures that might please the Lady. Mara still yearns to learn magic, but it’s hard for a poor, orphaned servant to dream when the path to becoming a mage is open to only an elite few. Then one day, while diving for the Lady, Mara finds the skeletons of strange hybrid creatures: a lizard with wings, a horse with horns, and many more, the likes of which have not existed in the city for centuries. The entire trove of bones is humming with a powerful spell-song. Mara is convinced the bones will earn her the opportunity to study magic. But rather than rewarding her discovery, the Lady gives Mara a challenge: to learn where the magical bones came from by sneaking into the Winter Blade, an island fortress ruled by the very same sorcerer who killed Bindy years ago. What Mara finds will reveal chilling truths about her own past, as well as secrets about the history of her beloved city that are more dangerous–and magical–than she had ever imagined.

Kali Wallace creates a stunning and unusual world in this fantasy that is at once bound up in myth and legend and grounded in the gritty reality of fish markets and hardscrabble village life. Mara is a brave, determined, and ultimately thoughtful heroine who both yearns for and fears magic, and is willing to ask difficult questions about the responsibilities that come with power. The people that she cares about – loyal Fish Hook, caring Izzy, even the stately and distant Lady of the Tides – are fully drawn characters, some with their own surprisingly motivations. Underlying each of Mara’s discoveries is the yearning for family and grief for the loss of her parents and Bindy, the bone mage who took her in as a child. In uncovering secrets about the long-gone founders of the City of Islands, she also uncovers parts of her own past she might have preferred to stay hidden, and must come to understand a new definition of family.

CITY OF ISLANDS is out now.

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Read This!: THE MEMORY TREES by Kali Wallace

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The Memory TreesThe Memory Trees by Kali Wallace

Summary: Sorrow Lovegood’s life has been shaped by the stories of the women who came before her: brave, resilient women who settled long ago on a mercurial apple orchard in Vermont. The land has been passed down through generations, and Sorrow and her family take pride in its strange history. Their offbeat habits may be ridiculed by other townspeople—especially their neighbors, the Abrams family—but for the first eight years of her life, the orchard is Sorrow’s whole world.
Then one winter night everything changes. Sorrow’s sister Patience is tragically killed. Their mother suffers a mental breakdown. Sorrow is sent to live with her dad in Miami, away from the only home she’s ever known.
Now sixteen, Sorrow’s memories of her life in Vermont are maddeningly hazy; even the details of her sister’s death are unclear. She returns to the orchard for the summer, determined to learn more about her troubled childhood and the family she left eight years ago. Why has her mother kept her distance over the years? What actually happened the night Patience died? Is the orchard trying to tell her something, or is she just imagining things?

Sorrow Lovegood is haunted by her family’s past, so it’s only fitting that Kali Wallace’s beautiful, atmospheric writing will absolutely haunt the reader. Wallace plunks the reader into the rivalries, both petty and great, of Abrams Valley, and explores the ways hatred and anger play out over generations. Sorrow is a girl at a crossroads, needing to process her past in order to move on, but so scarred by it that she has blocked out the parts she most needs to understand. Stories of Lovegood women throughout the years punctuate the narrative as they have punctuated Sorrow’s life – tales of strong woman who grew and maintained the orchard that has been their family’s livelihood for generations, who were buried in the cemetery where an ash tree has been planted for each grave. Women who were persecuted, and often accused of witchcraft, because they were strong and independent. Magical elements are taken as a given, so entwined are they in Sorrow’s life: of course the earth mourns with cold when a Lovegood dies; of course the favors Sorrow finds in the orchard – a broken pair of glasses, a pocket watch, a bead on a string – are gifts from the dead. Though there is pain, there is also hope; the only answers, Sorrow learns, are the ones that she and her generation will shape for themselves out of the grief, pain, and joy that have been handed down to them.

THE MEMORY TREES is out now.

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Read This!: SHALLOW GRAVES by Kali Wallace

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Shallow GravesShallow Graves by Kali Wallace

Summary: When seventeen-year-old Breezy Lin wakes up in a shallow grave one year after her death, she doesn’t remember who killed her or why. All she knows is that she’s somehow conscious—and not only that, she’s able to sense who around her is hiding a murderous past. In life, Breezy was always drawn to the elegance of the universe and the mystery of the stars. Now she must set out to find answers and discover what is to become of her in the gritty, dangerous world to which she now belongs—where killers hide in plain sight and a sinister cult is hunting for strange creatures like her. What she finds is at once empowering, redemptive, and dangerous.

Do not read this book when you are in the house alone – especially if you are a big scaredy cat like me. That said, Breezy, the main character, is more full of life than any reanimated corpse has a right to be. Horror and heart-pounding action alternates with witty banter, intense world-building, and characters that make you want to pull up a chair and hang out for awhile. (I dream of that brownie in the basement.) If you’re a horror reader, you’ll eat this right up. If you’re not a big horror reader, grab this anyway, because you won’t want to miss the great characters. Just, you know, keep the lights on and make sure someone else is around.

Shallow Graves is out now

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