Momo Arashima Steals the Sword of the Wind

A thrilling, funny new middle-grade fantasy series about a girl who must face demons set on bringing chaos in order to save her Shinto goddess mother and the world. Perfect for fans of Aru Shah and Fablehaven.

All Momo wants for her twelfth birthday is a "normal" life a 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 normal 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 "normal") identity as half-human, half-goddess to unlock her divine powers, save her mother s life, and force the demons back to Yomi.

Autorentext

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 and 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. Misa is also the author of three young adult novels: the award-winning It’s Not Like It’s a Secret and the critically acclaimed This Time Will Be Different and Love & Other Natural Disasters. Her short stories have appeared in The New York Times and the anthology Come On In: 15 Stories of Immigration and Finding Home.

You can find her online at misasugiura.com and @misallaneous1 on Twitter and Instagram.

Klappentext

A thrilling, funny middle-grade fantasy series about a girl who sets out to save her Shinto goddess mother-and the world-by facing down demons intent on bringing chaos. Perfect for fans of the Aru Shah and Fablehaven series.

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.

"Momo Arashima may be #71 on mean-girl Kiki Weldon's list of popular seventh graders, but she's #1 in the kami-verse! This wild ride of a novel is simultaneously a hilarious adventure and a meditation on fear, anger, bravery, friendship, and the ties of family and love." -Sayantani DasGupta, New York Times bestselling author of the Kingdom Beyond series

Leseprobe
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 someth…