Spell and Spindle
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Doll Bones meets Splendors and Glooms as a boy who trades bodies with a wooden marionette. . . .
The Museum of Peculiar Arts holds many oddities--a mechanical heart, a diary bound in its owner's skin . . . and Penny, a child-size marionette who almost looks alive. Fog clouds Penny's memories from before the museum, but she catches glimpses here and there: a stage, deep red curtains, long-fingered hands gripping her strings.
One day, a boy named Chance touches Penny's strings and hears her voice in his head. Penny can listen, and watch, and think?
Now someone else is watching Penny and Chance--a man with a sharp face, a puppeteer who has the tools to change things. A string through a needle. A twist of a spindle. And suddenly Chance is trapped in Penny's marionette body, while Penny is free to run and dance. She knows that finding a way to switch back is the right thing to do. But this body feels so wonderful, so full of life! How can Penny ever return to her puppet shell?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in 1952, Schusterman's suspenseful, complex tale of adventure, magic, and soul-swapping stars an unstoppable pair of siblings, 13-year-old Constance and 11-year-old Chance Bonvillain, as well as a sad and startlingly lifelike marionette, Penny. Constance and Chance have always lived above the rundown Museum of the Peculiar Arts, where Penny and Fortunato, the museum's elderly owner, reside, and where Chance helps out. When the museum is sold, the Bonvillains prepare to move to the suburbs, and Chance, in despair, hatches a plan to run away. Things grow complicated when Fortunato bequeaths Penny to Chance and more complicated still after he and Penny discover that they can hear each other's thoughts. When Chance and Penny accidentally switch bodies, the story takes on layers of mystery, introducing a creepy, ageless puppeteer, a host of missing children, and a traveling carnival that becomes key to the fast-paced plot. As her brother's drama draws him into danger, clever Constance jumps into action to save him, and Penny proves herself a hero, too. The novel's increasingly complicated intrigue will keep readers speculating right up to the gripping climax. Ages 8 12.
