Eighteen-year-old Ava has saved the world 152 times – ever since she got her hands on her first console. It’s all fun and games, but after a mysterious encounter with not-a-vampire Brad, she discovers that the mythological creatures she’s only ever seen in video games are actually totally real. Brad reveals they’re alien refugees living among humans – bonus points because Ava finds the guy really, really cute.
As she’s suddenly thrust into a quest with a surfer wendigo, a friendly manananggal, a telepathic nine-tailed fox, a Sudoku-loving centaur, and a huggable Bigfoot, Ava embarks on an actual mission to fend off an alien invasion – and she soon realizes that this time, she just might need to save the world for real.
Where’s a save point when you need one?
The Midnight Children trilogy is a series of dark fantasy novels for children age 8-13 combining Asian mythology and Gothic elements. The characters, ten-year-old Min and twelve-year-old Zak are the main protagonists.
In The Midnight Children: A Vanishing, Zak and Min’s father mysteriously disappears at breakfast and curious things then begin to happen to them. Min encounters two small creatures with spider-like legs, a doll that runs, talks and steals and Shaz, the shaman, who gives her a box with a finger bone inside. Zak is chased by a strange man on all fours in the shopping mall, flees from snakes that interrupt his homework and is visited by a ghostly old lady in his bedroom who happens to love matcha ice cream.
Trying to find their father, they are transported to an eerie world called the Moonlight World where oily creatures want to kidnap and eat them. The novel concludes with Zak vanishing one night during dinner.
Keix wakes up in an underground prison-weak, emaciated, and battling partial memory loss. Her rescuers and long-time friends, Zej and Pod, tell her she’s been put in a coma for two years. Her captor: Atros, the organization she had joined as a trainee soldier since she was fourteen. Keix doesn’t want to believe them but the evidence just keeps stacking up. Vile beasts called Odats, engaged by Atros as mercenaries, attack her as she makes her escape from the prison. And she finds out that Atros is also keeping her best friend Vin locked up.
Keix’s ancestry (her father is a Kulcan, a fierce race of warriors) helps her regain her lost memories and strength quickly under her friends’ care. Soon, she gets handed proof that Atros is building a ghost army-the very enemies the organization has been tasked to protect the people from. To make matters even more complicated, Ifarls, a race with mysterious magical powers, try to influence her to attempt a dangerous mission to break Vin out. They also tell Keix they want to close the portal between the living and the dead, to end decades of misery that the underworld has brought.
Swept into the undercurrents of distrust and differing agendas between the races, will Keix, who considers herself as an outsider because of her mixed bloodline, be able to walk her own path?
