The Girl from Coldriver
Elisa Thompson
language
(, July 13, 2018)
When city boy Drew comes to small-town Coldriver to live with his Gran, the most exciting thing he can hope for is to finally play center on the high school basketball team. Instead he discovers that Coldriver isn’t like anywhere else on earth. Ruled by the ley lines that intersect the town and the magical power of the arts, the people of Coldriver hold to a different set of values. In this twisted reality statues come to life, music can literally blow your socks off, ballet is king, and a mere poem can kill. Against this strange and unexpected backdrop, Drew meets Cadence. At first she seems like the perfect all-American girl. She’s gorgeous, smart—she even plays violin in the school orchestra—and they seem to click perfectly. But when Drew discovers that Cady is next in line for the matriarchal power of the clan that rules the town, he is drawn swiftly into a labyrinth of danger. Someone’s trying to kill Cady, and now it looks like they’re after him, too. Together with his new best friend and basketball sidekick, Banjo, Drew goes on a quest to discover what’s really going on in Coldriver. Spurred by his own weird dreams about a long-dead Russian girl and a glowing green stone, Drew finds himself in a race against the clock to save Cady. Unless he can discover a way to reverse the magic, Cady’s fate as the next Matushka on the sundown of her seventeenth birthday will be sealed. And with a cast of crazy Stepanov relatives all vying for Cady’s birthright, Drew is afraid she might not survive that long. The only way out is to realize his own connection to the town and the power of the ley.