The Vanishing Station
A Novel
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Author Ana Ellickson’s The Vanishing Station is a lyrical and bold YA debut about an underground magic system in San Francisco—and the lengths one girl is willing to go to protect the ones she loves.
Eighteen-year-old Filipino American Ruby Santos has been unmoored since her mother’s death. She can’t apply to art school like she’s always dreamed, and she and her father have had to move into the basement of their home and rent out the top floor while they work to pay back her mother’s hospital bills.
Then Ruby finds out her father has been living a secret life as a delivery person for a magical underworld—he “jumps” train lines to help deliver packages for a powerful family. Recently, he’s fallen behind on deliveries (and deeper into alcoholism), and if his debts aren’t satisfied, they’re going to take her mother’s house. In an effort to protect her father and save all that remains of her mother, Ruby volunteers to take over her dad’s station and start jumping train lines.
But this is no ordinary job. Ruby soon realizes that the trains are much more than doors to romance and adventure: they’re also doors to trafficking illicit goods and fierce rivalries. As she becomes more entangled with the magical underworld and the mysterious boy who’s helped her to learn magic, she realizes too late that she may be in over her head. Can she free her father and save her mother’s house? Or has she only managed to get herself pulled into the dangerous web her father was trapped in?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ellickson delivers an ambitious, fast-paced fantasy crackling with complicated family dynamics and forbidden love in this simmering debut. Since her mother's death, 18-year-old Ruby Santos and her father have been forced to rent out their beloved San Francisco home to pay off lingering medical debt. Ruby's plans for art school are a distant memory, replaced by low-paying work and taking care of her alcohol dependent father, who experiences chronic pain. After receiving an ominous invitation to the wealthiest part of the city, she discovers that her father had been working as a magical courier for the Bartholomew family, an organized crime group that controls the enchanted portals on San Francisco's BART line. To clear her father's debts, Ruby takes over his contracted service to the Bartholomews, and scrambles to find footing in a dangerous underworld where subway knife fights span continents. Though the conclusion feels rushed, Ruby's burgeoning connection with the Bartholomews' heir—which develops through liberal references to contemporary art and poetry—is swoonworthy, and the story impresses in its sensitive portrayal of living with a loved one navigating health challenges. Ruby is Filipino and Irish American; the Bartholomews cue as white. Ages 12–up.