Blurb:A magical journal. A world savaged by its own suns. An evil prince. A princess in hiding. And a teenage girl who learns to be the hero of her own story.Sixteen-year-old Olive Joshi has obsessive-compulsive disorder, and can't stop worrying about hurting the people she loves. She finds refuge in writing about Coseema, a magical princess on a distant planet. Coseema is fearless, confident, and perfect - everything Olive thinks she’ll never be. When she falls through a portal into her own unfinished story, Olive finds herself in a world in peril: double suns scorch the land, the brutal Prince Burnash seeks supreme power, and Coseema is nowhere to be found. Together with her friends - a bold poet, a cursed musician, a renegade soldier, and an adventurous girl from the desert - Olive will have to face her deepest fears to find the hero in herself.The Twin Stars is an engrossing new portal fantasy in the spirit of the Wizard of Oz, the Neverending Story, and the Chronicles of Narnia.
Olive
kept her eyes shut the entire time she was in the air.
She
sat behind Zeph, her arms wrapped around his waist and her face pressed into
his back, but she was too terrified even to blush. She heard Bel, somewhere to
her left, giggling and shrieking like a child on a roller coaster. She heard
the flapping of leathery wings and the whistling of air as it whipped up her
hair and pulled at her sleeves and pant legs. But she saw nothing. She feared
that if she opened her eyes for even an instant, she would fall to the desert
floor, or throw up, or both.
The
Raiders’ pteroks may have been tame, but they looked as nightmarish as ever.
They were more like dragons than bats: mouths brimming with fangs, a row of
spikes along whiplike tails, talons as long as Olive’s hand. Only their
jet-black fur offered a reassuring softness; everything else was barbs and
thorns and razor edges, and their eyes, so big and endearing in the chicks,
looked sunken and menacing in the faces of the adults.
Flying
horses, thought Olive to herself. Why
couldn’t I have invented flying horses?
She
had almost been too frightened to climb onto the back of her ride. Zeph
described Midnight, Gloamie’s mother, as the gentlest pterok in the colony.
Olive, who had thought the creature looked as though it were considering which
part of her body to bite first, had not found that description particularly
encouraging. Zeph had assured her that they would fly slowly, that he would
guide the pteroks with his music, and that all Olive would have to do was hold
on.
“Has
anyone ever fallen?” Olive had asked.
Zeph
had chuckled lightly and had not actually replied.
“Olive!”
Bel screamed from somewhere to the right, where she and her aunt were riding a
second pterok. “Isn’t this the best?”
Olive
made a muffled noise, her face still scrunched up against Zeph’s back. The ride
was not smooth like the fluttercamel’s had been; it was bumpy and twitchy, and
the pterok tilted its body to the side far too often.
After
what must have been fifteen or twenty minutes, Zeph played a series of falling
notes on his stringed instrument, and the pterok began to descend. Olive opened
her eyes only when its feet touched down with a final jolt. Her arms felt stiff
as she unclasped them from around Zeph’s waist. She slid off the pterok’s wing
like a rag doll, and for a minute she sat crumpled on the sand, waiting to
catch the breath she’d left far behind her.
Bel
extended a hand to help her up. The girl wore a broad smile, her cheeks flushed
and her braids loose. Olive raised a hand to her own hair and made a
halfhearted effort to smooth it down, then stood on trembling legs, her stomach
flopping about like a stranded fish. She tried to mask her discomfort with a
smile of her own.
“Quite
a rush, huh?” asked Reen.
“That
was amazing!” Bel gave her pterok a pat on its hideous snout. “Wasn’t it,
Olive?”
Olive
grunted something that sounded vaguely affirmative.
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