Delphernia Undersea wants to sing. But everyone on Blightsend knows music belongs to the Masters — and girls with singing throats are swallowed by the sea.
On the strange, stormy island of Blightsend, twelve-year-old Delphernia Undersea has spent her whole life in the cloister of turnaway girls, hidden from sea and sky by a dome of stone and the laws of the island. Outside, the Masters play their music. Inside, the turnaway girls silently make that music into gold. Making shimmer, Mother Nine calls it. But Delphernia can't make shimmer. She would rather sing than stay silent. When a Master who doesn't act like a Master comes to the skydoor, it's a chance for Delphernia to leave the cloister. Outside the stone dome, the sea breathes like a wild beast, the sky watches with stars like eyes, and even the gardens have claws. Outside, secrets fall silent in halls without sound. And outside, Delphernia is caught — between the island's sinister Custodian and its mysterious Childer-Queen. Between a poem-speaking prince and a girl who feels like freedom. And in a debut that glimmers with hope and beauty, freedom — to sing, to change, to live — is precisely what's at stake.
2 of 2 copies available
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
October 9, 2018 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781536204445
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781536204445
- File size: 2211 KB
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Languages
- English
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Levels
- ATOS Level: 4.5
- Lexile® Measure: 650
- Interest Level: 4-8(MG)
- Text Difficulty: 2-3
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Reviews
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January 1, 2019
Lyrical language and vivid descriptions bring the eerie world of Blightsend alive in this haunting fantasy. Delphernia struggles to endure a life underground and alongside the sea, which she has been told since childhood will swallow her if she sings. Sinister villains, golden birds, a prince with a tortured soul, a young queen, and a strangely magnetic girl round out the cast of this spellbinding tale.(Copyright 2019 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)
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Starred review from September 1, 2018
In a land where music belongs solely to Masters, a 12-year-old girl dares to sing. Cloistered with the other turnaway girls, Delphernia Undersea knows her place is to be quiet and invisible and her role to obediently transform the Masters' music into gold--a process called "making shimmer." But somewhere between knowing her place and actually keeping it, Delphernia not only cannot make shimmer, but she flouts Mother Nine's warnings that the sea swallows girls with singer throats and sings secretly at night, molding her voice's bright notes into fluttering golden birds. When a strange Master chooses to take her with him as part of the Festival of Bells, Delphernia is suddenly thrust into a dangerous world of music, royalty, unearthed secrets, and freedom in the form of a pale, defiant trans girl named Linna. Music and secrets, in fact, are in the very bones of this debut novel. Chewins' unhurried, first-person narration by a brown-skinned, curly-haired protagonist deftly reveals a tapestry of magic, power, and rebellion thread by ethereal thread. Questions of stratified gender roles, corruption, and what happens when a society stops asking questions fit with (and even enhance) Chewins' tale of music, magic, and self-discovery. An abrupt conclusion is the only piece that feels out of place, distracting precisely because readers will have been utterly mesmerized by the rest of the narrative.Hope is ever the thing with feathers, and feathers abound here. (Fantasy. 10-14)COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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