MIDNIGHT BLUE

Bonnie’s solemn journey to an eerily similar world that holds everything she’s ever yearned for—and also her worst terrors—is written with grace and pain. When her bitter, sadistic grandmother won’t allow Bonnie and her effusive but shaky mother to create a life for themselves, Bonnie escapes to the garden of the mysterious Michael and jumps into an enormous balloon that Michael had intended to ride into the sky. She flies upward and crashes down into a partly recognizable landscape with people who shockingly resemble her, her mother, and Michael. Their stable, kind family takes her in, but a vague, supernatural threat looms, eventually embodied by a terrifying version of grandmother. Help from hill spirits both comforts and chafes Bonnie as she struggles with feelings of jealous fury toward her lucky double. The murky definition of evil power—is it simply hatred?—creates a weighty depth. Entrancing and substantial. (Fiction. 10+)