About this item
Michelle Ruiz Keils YA fantasy debut about love, found family, and healing is an ode to post-punk San Francisco through the eyes of a Mexican-American girl.. Seventeen-year-old Xochi is alone in San Francisco, running from her painful past: the mother who abandoned her, the man who betrayed her. Then one day, she meets Pallas, a precocious twelve-year-old who lives with her rockstar family in one of the citys storybook Victorians. Xochi accepts a position as Pallass live-in governess and quickly finds her place in the girls tight-knit household, which operates on a free-love philosophy and easy warmth despite the bands growing fame. . But on the night of the Vernal Equinox, as a concert afterparty rages in the house below, Xochi and Pallas perform a riot-grrrl ritual in good fun, accidentally summoning a pair of ancient beings bound to avenge the wrongs of Xochis past. She would do anything to preserve her new life, but with the creatures determined to exact vengeance on those whove hurt her, no one is safe - not the family Xochis chosen, nor the one she left behind.
About the Author
Michelle Ruiz Keil is a writer and tarot reader with an eye for the enchanted and a way with animals. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, All of Us With Wings, called "...a transcendent journey" by the New York Times and "...a fantastical ode the Golden City's post-punk era" by Entertainment Weekly, was released from Soho Teen in 2019. She is a 2020 Literary Lions honoree and the recipient of a 2020 Hedgebrook residency. Her short fiction can be found on Cosmonauts Avenue and the anthologies Color Outside The Lines and Dispatches From Anarres. A San Francisco Bay Area native, Michelle has lived in Portland Oregon for many years. She curates the fairytale reading series All Kinds of Fur and lives with her family in a cottage where the forest meets the city.
