Ghoulish Song
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
A brave girl flees a ghoul while trying to save her city in this lively companion to Goblin Secrets, the National Book Award winner that Kirkus Reviews calls “humorous, poignant, and convincing.”
Kaile lives in Zombay, an astonishing city where goblins walk the streets and witches work their charms and curses. Kaile wants to be a musician and is delighted when a goblin gives her a flute carved out of bone. But the flute’s single, mournful song has a dangerous consequence: it separates Kaile and her shadow.
Anyone without a shadow is considered dead, and despite Kaile’s protests that she’s alive and breathing, her family forces her to leave so she can’t haunt their home. Kaile and her shadow soon learn that the troublesome flute is tied to a terrifying ghoul made from the bones of those who drowned in the Zombay River. With the ghoul chasing her and the river threatening to flood, Kaile has an important role to play in keeping Zombay safe. Will Kaile and her shadow be able to learn the right tune in time?
Set in the delightful and dangerous world of Goblin Secrets, Ghoulish Song is a gripping adventure laced with humor and mystery from National Book Award–winning author William Alexander. His “graceful prose weaves an engaging fantasy that embraces the power of music” (Publishers Weekly).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this more focused companion to Alexander's National Book Award winning debut, Goblin Secrets, the author revisits the macabre city of Zombay to tell another tale of art as the fundamental underpinning of important magic. Kaile is a baker's daughter who loves music. She crosses paths with a goblin who gives her a bone flute, but when Kaile plays the flute, her shadow separates from her body. Her family believes she has died ("Only the dead don't have shadows," her younger brother says), and Kaile is forced to leave home. While seeking the origins of the flute, so she can reunite with her frightened shadow and return to her family, Kaile instead finds her music is the key to saving the city. There is magic in almost every aspect of Alexander's world, including the sinister sentience of the river and the bones of the drowned, and his graceful prose weaves an engaging fantasy that embraces the power of music. While this story shares its setting and basic plot with the previous book, many questions about Zombay are yet to be answered. Ages 8 12.
