We’re happy to share this post from our sister site, Kids Corner @ Kindle Nation Daily, where you can find all things Kindle for kids and teens, every day!
Last week we announced that Dew Pellucid’s High-Concept, Fantasy Adventure For Middle Grade And Young Adult Readers, The Sound And The Echoes is our Kids Corner Book of the Week and the sponsor of our student reviews and of thousands of great bargains in the Kids Book category: over 300 free titles, over 500 quality 99-centers, and hundreds more that you can read for free through the Kindle Lending Library if you have Amazon Prime!
Now we’re back to offer a free Kids Corner excerpt, and if you aren’t among those who have downloaded this one already, you’re in for a treat!
The Sound and the Echoes is a high-concept, fantasy adventure for middle grade and young adult readers, with 27 magical illustrations, which you can enjoy on http://TheSoundAndTheEchoes.com.
Imagine that everyone around you has a mirror image living somewhere else. Your world is like a sound, which produced that other world of echoes. And in this land men are governed by a terrible law—no Echo is allowed to live after his Sound dies.
One Sound especially must die. The Prince’s Sound. The Fate Sealers and Fortune Tellers will make sure of that! Because after this Sound dies, the Echo Prince will have to die too.
Now, twelve-year-old Will Cleary is about to discover that he is the Sound the Echoes are hunting. And so begins his perilous adventure into a see-through, sparkling world, filled with spying crystal balls, an eerie fortress of castaway children, a hunt for clues in an ancient book of riddles, and a last-chance escape through a frozen gem-studded lake into a secret land that holds the key to placing the Prince on the throne and returning freedom to the Echoes.
Reviews
“The Sound and the Echoes is an extraordinary tale that will be loved by many children, teachers, and their parents alike… It is a must in any school or home library.” –Author Anna del C. Dye
“Friendship, loyalty and strength of character shine very brightly in this book.” –Stephanie D. for Readers Favorite
“Dew Pellucid offers a reader much, awakening an indefinable, irreverent child-like depiction of an imaginative, strange, beautiful world.” –Sean Randall, Goodreads Librarian “I believe my twelve year old self would have loved this book.” –Lace and Lavender Hints Book Blog
“If adventure is what you crave, The Sound and the Echoes delivers.” –Anastacia Hawkins for Readers Favorite
And here, for your reading pleasure, is our free excerpt:
Dew Pellucid
__________
The Sound
&
The Echoes
__________
Art by Andy Simmons
Dear Un-Pellucid Reader,
Far, far away, in a land few Sounds have ever seen, stands the palace of Agám Kaffú. Not a palace of marble and silks, you understand. Nothing like those over-gilded palaces of the Sound realm. No, in the Land of the Echoes the palace glitters like a frozen snowflake in the early light of morning. And it looks like one too.
The walls are carved from gleaming ice that never melts, and the floors look like silent ponds you can walk on. Yes, you’ll find curtains and tapestries to rival the finest woven art of the Taj Mahal or Buckingham Palace, but here they look like waterfalls sown together, foaming and splashing but never, never flowing away.
It’s so many decades since my father took me to see it, that magnificent palace on Iceberg Mountain. Or is it centuries? Even the chandeliers resembled frozen bubbles, I remember. And the pillars looked like towering mounds of snowflakes. But if you were to see it, un-pellucid reader that you are, you wouldn’t notice the waterfall curtains or the ice cube walls. No, for you the things that would stagger belief would be alive. Trees, people, dogs… Because, you see, in the Echo realm, every living thing is see-through.
Not entirely see-through, you understand. Not invisible… well, not everyone… not all the time. But I’m getting ahead of myself. You’ll have to find it out in the proper way, turning page after page in this strange story of a Sound, a boy, who was hunted by those terrifying demons of darkness known as the Fate Sealers and their oracle masters, the Fortune Tellers.
But did it really all happen, you might wonder? Certainly, in the Echo realm, that is.
But is the Echo realm real?
Ah! That is the fortune-changing question you’ll have to answer for yourself.
Yours Obscurely,
Dew Pellucid
The Mysterious Reappearance
Will Cleary sat in the dark listening to the howling wind.
It was an old, familiar sound that reminded Will of his nightmares, where creatures he could not see were shrieking through the holes in his bedroom walls. The creatures were a dream, but the holes and room were real and so the nightmares felt real. Will used to try and plug them, the holes. But the old cabin he and his parents lived in was falling apart with age, and Will had long since given up.
Only one precious object was beautiful in Will’s ugly room and he held it, cool between his hands. It was a crystal ball that glowed faintly like a strange basketball made of shimmering glass. There were numbers inside, falling through a bright mist, the big ones like snowflakes, the small ones like rain in slow-motion. At the moment the number eight was the biggest, and it hovered beside the smaller forty-one, with a tiny two raining down on the right, then three, four, five… It was eight forty-one in the morning according to the crystal ball clock, the start of a new day. But the falling numbers that disappeared in the fog made it seem as if time was raining out of existence.
The crystal ball clock was the first thing Will Cleary remembered from childhood. That and his nightmares.
The pale light of the shimmering crystal ball blinded Will to everything else in his cold, dark bedroom. But he could still see, a little past him, almost hovering in the blackness, the face of his white wolf with her dark-rimmed yellow eyes that seemed to see into his soul.
“’Cause I had the nightmare again,” said Will, as if the wolf had asked a question. “Not going back to sleep to have it again… and again and again. Anyway, almost time. Look.”
Will held the crystal ball out to the wolf, and in her yellow eyes two crystal ball reflections appeared with silent, falling numbers.
Then, in a moment, there was something else.
Inside the crystal ball a miniature boy appeared, looking tall and lanky, with long gangly legs and glasses. The falling seconds bounced off his curly brown hair, and the large hour and minutes hovered over him like a cloud. But the boy inside the crystal ball never noticed.
“He’s here,” said Will to the wolf.
In a flash Will was dashing downstairs. The floorboards groaned under him, and the front door whined as he tore it open, as if it would fall off. But it didn’t, and there was the boy from the crystal ball clock standing on the creaky doorstep, looking real and full-sized and very pleased with himself.
“You found it?” asked Will.
“In the museum library,” said the boy, waving a greeting at the wolf. “It’s all about—”
“Wait, Ben… Outside.”
“Outside…? As in sit and chat? It’s freezing, if you haven’t noticed.”
“I’ve noticed,” said Will, leading the way to a snowy porch bench.
The morning was still black and ominous, as if the winter wind had blown the sunrise off the ledge of the horizon. But Will had brought the crystal ball clock with him, and it cast its pale white light between him and Ben as they sat down. Then Ben pulled out a slab of white marble from his coat.
“I thought you were bringing a book?” Will frowned.
“It is a book.”
“But it looks—”
“Like a gravestone, I know. Lots of gravestones, actually.”
With trembling hands, Ben turned the strange book over to reveal the title: Disappeared without a Trace? It was printed where the names of the dead were usually carved in cemeteries.
The white wolf turned to look at Will and Ben, as if something had startled her. Then she took to pacing the porch, back and forth, back and forth, her yellow eyes peering at the dark snowy garden where the leafless trees were swaying in the wind like dancing skeletons.
But Will didn’t notice his pet. “Disappeared Without a Trace…” he read the title aloud, as a dark hiding place ripped open in his mind.
It was that secret place where Will tucked his most painful thoughts of his twin sister, Emmy—the sister he couldn’t remember because she disappeared ten years ago when they were only two. Emmy was the reason Will’s parents had let their home fall apart. She was the reason they had almost gone mad with sorrow. And now she was the reason why he and Ben had to sit outside, shivering in the cold, just to keep their conversation secret. For any talk of Emmy always ended in insane rescue plans and false hope.
“You found the proof?” Will gasped. “Emmy’s dead.”
“No, Will.” Ben’s pale eyes glittered by the light of the crystal ball clock. “You don’t understand. It’s just the opposite. You’re in the book. You disappeared just like Emmy. But you came back. And if you came back, you know what that means?”
But Will had expected to hear something quite different. An end to the mystery, not more infuriating false hope.
“Don’t you start, Ben!” snapped Will. “My Mom’s out there on the pond—looking for Emmy! She’s been doing that for ten years! My Dad hasn’t stopped looking for clues either. The last thing they need is you telling them I know the secret to bringing Emmy back.”
“But if it’s true?”
“Ben, Emmy drowned! Unless she’s a mermaid, she’s not coming back.”
“So why didn’t they find her body?” insisted Ben.
“Because—”
But that was the fatal question no one could answer.
For a moment Will listened to his old home creaking and groaning in the wind, until he could face the disappointment of another impossible idea. For Ben had to be wrong.
“Don’t you think my parents would have told me if I disappeared like Emmy?” said Will quietly.
“Perhaps we should have,” answered a quiet voice from the wild, snowy garden. And an old man with a young face ambled tiredly up the broken porch steps into the pale light of the crystal ball clock.
“Dad!” Will jumped back, startled. “Thought you were in the library.”
Mr. Cleary bent to shake Ben’s hand in greeting, and in the light of the crystal ball clock Mr. Cleary looked more like Will’s older brother than his father—with blond, tousled hair that looked like straw and a small, thin body that resembled a scarecrow dressed in old clothes. Even Mr. Cleary’s eyes were a lot like Will’s; large, melancholy brown eyes that spoke of a sad heart.
“Came across this idea in Dew Pellucid’s manuscript,” Mr. Cleary said sadly, puffing on a large pipe. “Secret passage in the pond… False scent, I’m afraid. But this?” Mr. Cleary frowned at the strange gravestone book. “New clues to Emmy?”
“Yes,” said Ben eagerly.
“No,” said Will flatly. He could feel himself getting angry. Not a make-your-blood-boil sort of angry, but a hopeless, helpless, falling-into-a-dark-hole anger that leaves you feeling cold and bitter.
“What now?” said Will sharply. “Think I disappeared like Emmy? Think I can remember how to bring her back?” Suddenly Will felt as if all these years his parents had been blaming him for something he couldn’t even remember.
“That’s just it,” said Mr. Cleary softly; while Ben fidgeted with embarrassment, and the wolf seemed to raise her eyebrows at Will in disapproval. “We knew you’d think that,” explained Mr. Clearly. “So we never told you, Mom and I. But how could you possibly remember anything, Will? You were barely two. It happened on Christmas, you see. On your birthdays. You and Emmy disappeared together. Well… we think you were together. We’ll never know for sure.”
“Because you can’t remember, right?” said Ben, rifling through the gravestone book. “Every page here’s about someone who disappeared. Hundreds of people, but especially kids. And no one remembers how they disappeared. Not one witness.”
“What does the book say about me?” asked Will grudgingly, dreading something terrible, a horrible reason why his sister died, but he had managed to return alive.
“Finally!” said Ben. And he dropped the strange, heavy book in Will’s lap.
But as Will started reading the page Ben had bookmarked for him, he realized that his disappearance was clouded in as much mystery as his sister’s. And yet, the story of his return was no mystery at all.
“My pets brought me back?” mumbled Will in disbelief.
“Yes, a week after you disappeared,” said Mr. Cleary, his face shrouded in pipe smoke. “We were there, Mom and I. Saw everything. How strange… So hard to believe. One minute the pond was frozen, the next the center was melting. And then you popped out, riding a wolf… with a falcon circling over you. You kept calling out the animals’ names: ‘Deá, Damian… Deá, Damian…’ in your cute toddler’s voice. That’s how we knew what to call them.
“Mom never let the hole in the pond freeze over since then,” added Mr. Cleary. “Kept it defrosted with buckets until I had the water heater installed. One day Emmy will follow you home, and we will be ready, Will. We will be ready.”
Mr. Cleary sighed and whispered to himself, “Ah, Emmy…. alone, alone, all, all alone… alone on a wide, wide sea.”
In the same moment, the shadow of a bird circling in the bleak black sky fell over Mr. Cleary’s features, making him look almost faceless. Soon the dark, speckled bird came to a landing on the wolf’s white back, and the two animals stared long at each other as if exchanging wordless greetings.
In the back of Will’s mind he could hear his father and Ben still talking, but he stopped listening. He was watching the falcon and the wolf, wondering what other secrets his pets could reveal if they could talk. Or if he could read their minds the way they sometimes seemed to read his. Then, his thoughts still mingling hope with curiosity, Will bent over the gravestone book again and read the rest of his story.
William Cleary was naked at the time of his reappearance, but his body was covered in a strange glowing plant. No such plant is known to grow anywhere on earth. Despite extensive laboratory testing, it remains unknown why the plant glows at times but not at others. One unsubstantiated theory postulates that a chemical reaction results when the plant comes in contact with a yet unidentified type of gas.
“Dad?” Will looked up. “Was I covered in a plant? A glowing plant, when I came out of the pond?”
Smoke billowed from Mr. Cleary’s face, swirling in the wind.
“Why, yes…” Mr. Cleary nodded. “A beautiful shade of luminous green. Stopped glowing after a day or two, then started again from time to time. Last month, in fact. Glowed for me and Deá when I went to water the plant… down in the cellar. Would you like to see it?”
Will caught sight of Ben nodding so hard his head seemed about to pop off. And breathlessly, Will nodded too. He had no idea his home even had a cellar, and he wondered what else he might find there.
Mr. Cleary led the way into the cobwebbed, windswept house, past mountains of moldy books in the living room and stacks of filthy pots in the kitchen. Will’s crystal ball clock lit their way behind a moth-eaten curtain at the back of the dank laundry room, then down a dark, dusty stairway that creaked ominously. At the bottom, Mr. Cleary pulled on a dangling, filthy cord and an overhead light came on with a click.
Will gazed in wonder at the musty, windowless cellar. All the walls were lined with iron shelves from floor to ceiling, and every shelf was crammed with chests and boxes, piles of paper and shapeless bundles that gave no hint of what they hid inside. It was all covered in a thick layer of frosted dust and cobwebs, like a crypt that had been closed for centuries. But even down here, Will could hear his old home creaking and moaning in the winter wind blowing outside.
“You kept the plant in the dark?” wondered Ben.
“It likes the dark,” said Mr. Cleary, wiping cobwebs off a manuscript he found on a bottom shelf by the stairs. “Warts and Witchcraft in the Middle Ages.” Mr. Cleary sighed with fond remembrance. “I was twelve when I wrote it. Emmy’s age… and yours, of course, Will. Well, we didn’t come here for that.”
Patting his son’s shoulder affectionately, Mr. Cleary reached behind an old wicker chest labeled Our Memory Box and withdrew a jar of leaves floating in water. “Not glowing, I’m afraid,” he said, securing a lid over the jar.
But at that moment veins of luminescent green began to spread all through the stringy plant, up its stalks and down its leaves, which started to drift to and fro as if an invisible teaspoon were swirling the water. Soon the whole jar was glowing like a lantern between Mr. Cleary’s fingers, casting an eerie light on the wolf’s white fur as she pushed past Will, the dark, speckled falcon still perched on her back.
Spellbound, no one spoke—until the distant honk of a car shattered the silence.
Inside the crystal ball clock Will was still hugging to his side, the miniature hologram of Ben had disappeared. But now a tiny purple minivan emerged in its place, with a shadowy figure waving hello behind the steering wheel. The hour and minute numbers of the clock hung above the car, and the seconds bounced off the roof and vanished in the mist at the bottom of the crystal ball.
“My Mom,” said Ben, already rushing off. “Promised I wouldn’t make her wait….”
“Take it!” Mr. Cleary nodded at his son.
Will stuffed the glowing jar in his coat pocket and followed Ben to the front door of his creaking home, the wolf and falcon at his heels.
“Bring the gravestone book to school tomorrow,” shouted Ben, rushing to the real-life purple minivan parked before the house, its headlights slashing the early morning darkness. “And the plant!”
With a farewell honk the car sped away, and Will was left alone, wind gusting in his face, shaking snow showers from the treetops overhead.
Inside the crystal ball clock a tiny boy with strawy hair had replaced the fading car. It was Will, and in the smaller version of his face Will could see all the confusion he was feeling. Glowing leaves and reappearance acts, he thought desperately. What next? Talking pets? And suddenly Will heard a strange girl’s voice answering, as if someone was hearing his thoughts.
“Yes, you’re quite right. It’s time we had a good long chat, Will.”
Will snapped his head back. There was no one there! No one except Deá, the wolf, curled on the porch bench, watching him with her dark-rimmed yellow eyes.
“Yes! So let’s get on with it!” agreed a young man’s voice.
Will looked around, baffled. Only Damian, the falcon, was there, perched on the rail, fluttering his speckled wings.
“Who’s there?” cried Will.
“Don’t be an idiot!” the young man’s voice replied.
Will swiveled—and caught the falcon rolling his eyes at him.
“We have a lot to tell you,” said the bird impatiently, while the wolf jumped off the porch bench and gestured with her paw.
“Maybe you should sit down first,” she said kindly, and Will could have sworn that his white wolf was smiling at him.
Click here to buy the book: Dew Pellucid’s The Sound And The Echoes>>>