By Kwame Mbalia
A grieving seventh grader punches a hole in a tree and tumbles into Alke, a world where Anansi, John Henry, and Brer Rabbit are real and losing a war to monsters made of iron and chains.
Tristan Strong is a boxer's grandson who's terrible at boxing. A month ago his best friend Eddie died. Their school bus hit ice on a bridge and slid in front of a truck, and Eddie was pinned between the seats begging Tristan to pull him free, and Tristan couldn't do it. All he has left of Eddie is the notebook Eddie filled with stories. His parents send him to his grandparents' farm in Alabama to clear his head. The first night, a sticky, doll-sized creature named Gum Baby climbs in, snatches the notebook, and hauls it out the window. Tristan chases her to a bottle tree, throws a punch, and the tree splits open. On the other side is Alke, where the gods of West Africa and the folk heroes of Black America are alive and cornered. John Henry is real. Brer Rabbit is real. Anansi is real, and he's a problem. What's hunting them is made of iron and chains, and there's a ship on the horizon called the Maafa.
If your child just spent a year with Percy and the Greek gods, this is where they meet a whole other pantheon: Anansi, who came across the water with the people who were stolen, and John Henry, who was born right here. Kwame Mbalia is Black American, and this is his own inheritance. You feel it in the small things, the way the grandmother talks, the food, what a bottle tree is actually for. Those are the parts you can't research your way into. Everything that hooked your child on Percy is here too, a twelve-year-old dropped into a war, gods with attitude, a joke on nearly every page. What's different is the boy underneath it, who's sure he let his best friend die, and a book that carries that for four hundred pages instead of fixing it in one. Tristan is also very funny about being the worst fighter in a story full of fighters.