Higuera, Donna Barba
ALEBRIJES
ABOUT THE BOOK
This is the story as it was told to me by Leandro the Mighty.
For 400 years, Earth has been a barren wasteland. The few humans that survive scrape together an existence in the cruel city of Pocatel – or go it alone in the wilderness beyond, filled with wandering spirits and wyrms. They don’t last long.
13 year-old pickpocket Leandro and his sister Gabi do what they can to forge a life in Pocatel. The city does not take kindly to Cascabel like them – the descendants of those who worked the San Joaquin Valley for generations.
When Gabi is caught stealing precious fruit from the Pocatelan elite, Leando takes the fall. But his exile proves more than he ever could have imagined — far from a simple banishment, his consciousness is placed inside an ancient drone and left to fend on its own. But beyond the walls of Pocatel lie other alebrijes like Leandro who seek for a better world — as well as mutant monsters, wasteland pirates, a hidden oasis, and the truth.
From Donna Barba Higuera, Newbery and Pura Belpré Medal-winning author of The Last Cuentista, comes another novel to astonish us and create a whole new imaginative world, that holds a mirror to our own.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Donna grew up in central California surrounded by agricultural and oil fields. As a child, rather than dealing with the regular dust devils, she preferred spending recess squirreled away in the janitor’s closet with a good book. Her favorite hobbies were calling dial-a-story over and over again, and sneaking into a restricted cemetery to weave her own spooky tales using the crumbling headstones as inspiration.
Donna's Young Adult and Middle Grade books feature characters drawn into creepy, situations, melding history, folklore, and or her own life experience into reinvented storylines. She still dreams in Spanglish.
Donna lives in Washington State with her family, three dogs and two frogs. Donna's backyard is a haunted 19th century logging camp. (The haunted part may or may not be true—she makes stuff up.) She is a Critique-Group-Coordinator for SCBWI-Western Washington and teaches “The Hero’s Journey for Young Authors” to future writers.
Follow Donna on Twitter at @dbhiguera.
Donna Barba Higuera creció evitando los molestos polvos de los campos de petróleo del centro de California. Ha pasado toda su vida mezclando fábulas con sus experiencias para crear historias que llenan su imaginación. Ahora las combina escribiendo libros para niños y jóvenes. Finalmente, Donna cambió el polvo del centro de California por las nieblas del noreste del Pacífico. Ella vive allí con su esposo, cuatro hijos, tres perros y dos ranas.
