Momo Arashima Steals the Sword of the Wind - Softcover

Sugiura, Misa

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593564081 ISBN 13: 9780593564080

Verlag: Random House Children's Books, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

A thrilling fantasy series about a twelve year old girl who sets out to save her Shinto goddess mother—and the world—by facing down demons intent on bringing chaos.

“A grand adventure.” —Brandon Mull, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Fablehaven

“A wild ride of a novel…hilarious.” —Sayantani DasGupta, New York Times bestselling author of The Kingdom Beyond

All Momo wants for her twelfth birthday is an ordinary life—like everyone else's. At home, she has to take care of her absentminded widowed mother. At school, kids ridicule her for mixing up reality with the magical stories her mother used to tell her.

But then Momo’s mother falls gravely ill, and a death hag straight out of those childhood stories attacks Momo at the mall, where she’s rescued by a talking fox . . . and “ordinary” goes out the window. It turns out that Momo's mother is a banished Shinto goddess who used to protect a long-forgotten passageway to Yomi—a.k.a. the land of the dead. That passageway is now under attack, and countless evil spirits threaten to escape and wreak havoc across the earth.

Joined by Niko the fox and Danny—her former best friend turned popular jerk, whom she never planned to speak to again, much less save the world with—Momo must embrace her (definitely not "ordinary") identity as half human, half goddess to unlock her divine powers, save her mother’s life, and force the demons back to Yomi.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Misa Sugiura’s ancestors include a poet, a priestess, a samurai, and a stowaway. She was born and raised in Chicagoland but eventually found her way to her true home in Northern California, where she lives and writes under a giant oak tree with her husband, two sons, and a cat named Mouse. Momo Arashima Steals the Sword of the Wind is her first middle-grade novel and was inspired by the gods and monsters of her parents’ home country, Japan.

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Happy Birthday to Me

Niko says I should have known something was wrong from the moment he appeared in my backyard the night before my twelfth birthday. But I disagree. Because look—­I can guarantee you that most people who saw what I saw that night would’ve said to themselves, I must be dreaming, or, It must be some­thing I ate, and gone right back to bed.

And back then, I was trying really hard to be like most ­people.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. What happened was, I woke up to a yowl and a yippy bark. I got up and peeked out the window to see the neighbor’s cat streaking across the yard, which was not unusual—­but trotting oh-­so-­casually after it was a fox, which was unusual. The fox stopped in the middle of the yard, sat down, and pointed its sharp, twitchy nose and bright black eyes directly at my window.

The moon was shining from somewhere above and behind me, bathing the fox in cool silver light and casting a magical glow on the entire yard. As the fox stared at me, I was seized by this strange feeling that it knew who I was. Like it knew I was watching, and it was waiting for me. And then—­I swear I’m not lying—­it nodded at me and patted the ground with its paw. Yes, you, it seemed to be saying. Come out here at once. I need to talk to you.

That was not just unusual. It was unbelievable. Like, literally not able to be believed. “It’s just my imagination,” I muttered to myself. I shut my eyes and tried to shake what I’d seen out of my head. I couldn’t have seen it. That was the problem with having what my teachers called an “overactive imagination”—­I tended to see things that no one else could see. It hadn’t happened in a long time, and I was annoyed (and maybe a little afraid) that it was happening now. Because normal kids didn’t see things that weren’t real, and like I told you, I really wanted to be a normal kid.

I put my hand out to knock on the window. If it was a magical fox who was here for me, he’d nod again, or do something else strange and un-­fox-­like. If it was a regular old real fox, he’d run away. I tapped three times—­tap, tap, tap—­just as a cloud moved across the moon and helped break the silvery magical feeling. The fox looked startled and scampered into the shadow of a big pine tree at the edge of the yard.

Okay, whew, I thought. Regular old fox, then.

I could just barely see him huddled under the lowest branches of the pine tree, his tail covering him like a fluffy blanket. He stayed perfectly still for several minutes, and eventually I got tired of watching him and went back to bed. Like a normal person.

If I had bothered to go to the front of the house to take a look at that cloud over the moon, I might have seen why the fox had hidden so suddenly. And I would not have been able to go back to bed like a normal person, because I would have been completely terrified. Because it wasn’t really a cloud, as you may have guessed by now.

Hovering several feet in the air above the house, wearing a ragged black ball gown, black stiletto heels, and too much makeup, was a shikome—­one of the death hags who serve Iza­nami the Destroyer, Queen of Death. The shikome’s hair hung in patches from her scalp, which was peeling off her skull. Her eyes were pure white under her false eyelashes and drawn-­on eyebrows, and although her lips had caved into her toothless mouth, she’d done her best and smeared a bright red outline of lipstick around the gaping hole. When she breathed, it was with a rattling hiss that would make your skin crawl. I didn’t know it then, but she had followed that fox halfway around the world.

And she was waiting for me, too.



Mom didn’t mention my birthday at breakfast the next morning, which was odd. She forgot a lot of things, but she’d always done something special for my birthday: pancakes for breakfast, handmade jewelry, a drawing of the two of us.

“Um, are we doing anything for my birthday?” I asked her, a little annoyed.

“Oh. I—­I’m sorry, Momo, I forgot all about it.” She looked more nervous than sorry. She looked like she was lying, in fact. “Maybe we can do something tomorrow.”

I should have realized right then that something was wrong. But instead I decided to believe that she was planning a surprise, and dropped the subject. I told her about the fox—­without the waiting and winking part, because the whole issue with my imagination was kind of a sensitive subject between us. Still, Mom loves foxes, and I thought she’d get a kick out of knowing there had been one in the backyard. But instead of smiling with delight, or asking me reproachfully why I hadn’t woken her, she went pale.

“What did he look like?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Like a fox,” I said impatiently. “Sharp nose, bushy tail . . .”

“Where did he go?”

I shrugged. “The last I saw him, he was hiding under the pine trees.”

“Hmm.” Mom stared into the air, and her eyes grew ­un­focused.

“What?”

She refocused on me and bit her lip. “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all.” Shivering, she pulled her bathrobe more tightly around herself before sighing and leaning back in her chair, eyes closed.

I forgot about the fox. “Are you okay?”

“I’m just a little tired. I think I might go back to bed.”

She pushed herself up and left the kitchen, moving slowly, carefully, as if walking was causing her pain. As I finished getting ready for school, I wondered if I should make a doctor appointment for her. I was used to making them for myself—­she wasn’t the greatest at stuff like that. But how would I convince her to go? She hated doctors, and I couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone to one. If she was sick, we probably wouldn’t be able to do anything for my birthday, I thought with some disappointment.

I glanced at the clock. I’d have to think about all of that later. I had more pressing things to worry about, like getting through the school day. I sighed and swallowed the low-­key feeling of dread I always felt before going to school.

The thing is, I was not exactly what you would call well liked. Don’t get me wrong—­no one actively hated me or anything. But I was pretty much at the very bottom of the trash heap known as the seventh-­grade social scene. How do I know? You know these things. But if you want proof, I’ve got plenty.

For example, Kiki Weldon had recently made a list that ranked all seventy-­one seventh graders at Oak Valley Middle School in order of popularity, and it had gotten printed and posted on the wall at school.

Guess who was number seventy-­one.

Even worse than my rank was the fact that other low-­ranked kids seemed to think that associating with me might somehow jeopardize their sweet, sweet spots in the upper sixties. So Sunita Agrawal (#65) stopped answering my calls (forget about texts—­Mom didn’t let me have a cell phone). Eliza Lang (#67) rolled her eyes for all to see when she got partnered with me in Spanish class. Marina Fernandez (#68) turned her back on me when I sat down next to her at lunch. Literally no one wanted to be my friend anymore.

By the way, someone told on Kiki, and she was suspended and had to make an announcement on the PA system about how sorry she was and how wrong and cruel the list had been, etc., etc.,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Children's Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593564081
• ISBN 13: 9780593564080
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 400
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar