This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Translation copyright © 2019 by Owen F. Witesman
Text copyright © 2016 by Salla Simukka
Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2019 by Julia Iredale
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Crown Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover and in the Finnish language as Sisarla: Seikkailu Toisessa Maailmassa by Kustannusosakeyhtiö Tammi, Helsinki, Finland, in 2016.
Crown and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to FILI/the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture for a generous grant to translate this work from the original Finnish to the English language.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Simukka, Salla, author. | Witesman, Owen, translator.
Title: Sisterland / Salla Simukka ; translated from the Finnish by Owen F. Witesman. Other titles: Sisarla. English.
Description: First American edition. | New York : Crown Books for Young Readers, [2019] | Originally published in Finnish: Helsinki, Finland : Kustannusosakeyhtio Tammi, 2016, under the title Sisarla. | Summary: From a world where winter never seems to end, eleven-year-old Alice falls into a land of summer, meets her soul-sister Marissa, and works with her to overcome powerful Queen Lili.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019002078 (print) | LCCN 2019004118 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-5247-1880-0 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-5247-1878-7 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-1-5247-1879-4 (glb)
Subjects: | CYAC: Best friends—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Fantasy.
Classification: LCC PZ7.S6111684 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.S6111684 Sis 2019 (print) | DDC [Fic]—dc23
Ebook ISBN 9781524718800
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Part I: A Friend
Chapter 1: Too Much Snow
Chapter 2: The Garden Gate
Chapter 3: “Who Is Walking in My Garden?”
Chapter 4: Wind Fairies and Dream Weavers
Chapter 5: Strawberries and Raspberries
Chapter 6: Poeday
Part II: The Journey
Chapter 7: The Words of the Shapeshifter
Chapter 8: The Ocular Sea
Chapter 9: Heart Rock
Chapter 10: Lilianna
Chapter 11: Dragon Island
Part III: The Battle
Chapter 12: The Steps of the White Palace
Chapter 13: The Mirror of Shadows
Between the Worlds
Part IV: The Stranger
Chapter 14: The Return
Chapter 15: Don’t You Remember?
Chapter 16: The Kiss of the Shapeshifter
Chapter 17: The Old Woman in the Art Gallery
Chapter 18: Other Waters and Other Lands
Part V: Soul Sister
Chapter 19: A Message from a True Friend
Chapter 20: Tears
Chapter 21: Goodbyes
Chapter 22: It Wasn’t a Dream!
Chapter 23: The Painting
About the Author
About the Translator
To all my soul sisters,
the ones who have stayed,
the ones I’ve lost,
and the ones I’ve gotten back
“Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream!” said Alice, and she told her sister, as well as she could remember them, all these strange Adventures of hers that you have just been reading about; and when she had finished, her sister kissed her, and said, “It was a curious dream, dear, certainly: but now run in to your tea; it’s getting late.” So Alice got up and ran off, thinking while she ran, as well she might, what a wonderful dream it had been.
—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
“You see—you see,” she panted, “if no one knows but ourselves—if there was a door, hidden somewhere under the ivy—if there was—and we could find it; and if we could slip through it together and shut it behind us, and no one knew any one was inside and we called it our garden and pretended that—that we were missel thrushes and it was our nest, and if we played there almost every day and dug and planted seeds and made it all come alive—”
—Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
Strange to say, this snowflake grew larger and larger till at last it took the form of a woman dressed in garments of white gauze, which looked like millions of starry snowflakes linked together. She was fair and beautiful, but made of ice—glittering, dazzling ice. Still, she was alive, and her eyes sparkled like bright stars, though there was neither peace nor rest in them.
—Hans Christian Andersen, “The Snow Queen”
(in Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales: First Series, edited by J. H. Stickney)
Alice was just coming home from school when she saw a dragonfly flapping its shiny rainbow wings on a snowbank.
That’s strange, thought Alice. A dragonfly? At this time of year, with all this snow? How on earth could it have survived since summer, and what will happen to it out here in the cold?
The winter had actually been quite strange. The first snowfall came in late September. That wasn’t so peculiar—sometimes the first snow came early—but this time, it stuck, and that was odd. The first flakes left only a thin white dusting over the frozen earth, but then came more. And more. And more.
At first, people were excited. No dreary, slushy October, no depressing, dark November! The snow blew a layer of whipped cream over the entire landscape. Everything became white and beautiful, glittery and sparkly, shining and shimmery. The drifts grew and grew. First the children built snowmen and then snow families, and eventually entire tribes of snow creatures. The snow forts grew into castles and cities with streets and walls and moats. Some built labyrinths in the snow where you really could get lost and never again see anything but white walls of ice.
The schoolyard became an enormous winter adventure park with caves and tunnels and ice slides and snow mountains. Although the newspapers and television spoke with concern about the amount of snow and the cold, the truth was that everyone loved this extraordinary winter. In the beginning.
Alice was also excited. With her whole eleven-year-old heart, she longed for two things, and one of them was adventure. So this snowy-white world of wonder seemed like an answer to her wish. If this much snow could fall, then anything could happen!
However, by Christmas there was already so much snow that it was interfering with normal life. You could barely see out the first-floor windows of the apartment buildings. Homeowners had to work for hours every day to prevent their homes from disappearing. Keeping the roads open became so difficult in some outlying areas and smaller towns that
some people had to be evacuated from isolated homes to places where there was less snow.
Some refused to leave. They began living as in days of yore, dusting off their skis and trekking miles and miles to the nearest store. The heavy snow began to break tree branches. Some trees fell from the weight of the snow and cut power lines. Train traffic was canceled entirely because keeping the rails free of snow became impossible. The closer it came to the end of the year, the fewer people sighed about how lovely it would be to have a proper white Christmas for once.
The snow was not a friend anymore. It had become an enemy to be fought or at least beaten back until a truce could be made. Everything slowed down; everything took more time. Dressing in layers in the morning took time; the difficulty of travel multiplied the time it took to get to school and work; and the ever-tightening grip of the cold was like a silent terror that slowly crept from the belly to the thoughts and then into people’s dreams. Whenever you worked up the courage to go outside, all around lay a white, shining, ponderous silence.
The whole country just kept getting colder. The temperature dropped to twenty degrees below zero. What would happen if there wasn’t enough electricity to heat all the homes? People were always cold, and the cold made them more and more nasty to each other. They smiled less and felt less. When they did laugh, their laughter was harder, more erratic, and colder. It was as if people were freezing from the inside out.
Alice also felt this coldness inside sometimes, and it made her shiver. Amid all the snow and cold, she found herself wishing more and more for the other thing she wanted most in life: a best friend. Even though she had a mom, a dad, a big sister, and nice schoolmates, she’d never had a real best friend. Maybe that was why Alice had had two imaginary friends for as long as she could remember: Mirror Alice and Shadow Alice. Mirror Alice was her reflection, and Shadow Alice was her shadow. She frequently talked to her friends in her mind, even though she knew they weren’t real.
One day, Alice noticed that her shadow was gone. She couldn’t find it anywhere. Now that she knew to pay attention, she realized that everyone’s shadow had disappeared. Even though the sun shone between the storms, no one cast a shadow on the snow. Alice tried to tell her parents, but they just thought that everything was so white now that the shadows were hard to see. Alice thought that explanation was absurd, but she held her tongue.
So the winter was already strange in all sorts of ways, but a dragonfly at this time of year was the strangest of all. Alice pulled her phone out to search online for information about rare species of dragonflies that could live in the freezing cold.
Alice was good at searching for information and interested in everything around her. Sometimes she felt that adults weren’t as observant as kids or as intent on understanding things. Being eleven wasn’t easy because you were between being a child and a teenager, always either too big or too small. And everyone seemed to think that an eleven-year-old couldn’t understand life or the world. They were wrong. Or they didn’t remember what it was like to be eleven. Alice knew. It was like crawling under the rosebush where you’d always hidden as a child, but now suddenly the roses had grown thorns. Beautiful, enchanting, fragrant, and painfully prickly.
The internet didn’t have anything to say about dragonflies that lived in the winter. Alice’s fingers started to freeze, so she put her phone back in her pocket and pulled on her gloves. While she’d been staring at her phone, the dragonfly had disappeared. Of course. And she hadn’t even thought to take a picture of it.
However, now Alice noticed something else odd: She could see dog tracks in the snow. What was strange was that they started out of nowhere. It was as if the dog had dropped from the sky and then started walking through the snow. Alice followed the tracks to the small forest that began where the backyard of her apartment building ended. It was already starting to get dark. The cold nipped at her cheeks with its sharp claws.
Suddenly Alice began to have second thoughts. There were no human tracks next to the dog’s. So apparently it was loose. Although Alice wasn’t particularly scared of dogs, she always thought strays were a little unpredictable. She slowed down. Was it smart to go into a forest where there might be a strange dog without an owner? Alice bent down to take a closer look at the tracks. They were unusually big. Instantly an image appeared in her head from a nature book she’d read many times. Then Alice knew: These were no dog’s paw prints—these were wolf tracks!
A large wolf, which was somewhere out there in the shadows of the forest, waiting for her.
Alice stopped. She took a step backward. And then it happened.
Suddenly the snow gave way beneath Alice. She sank up to her waist, but before she could cry for help, she continued dropping. Alice fell with a whooshing through the soft, cold whiteness.
Alice tumbled for so long that she lost all sense of time. She might have even nodded off at some point, or fainted. Over and over, she thought that this was not normal, and that she should have hit solid earth by now. There couldn’t be this much snow anywhere. Not even if there were a giant pit in the ground full of snow.
Everything around Alice was white, until suddenly it went dark and she saw only blackness. Then she thudded down on her back on something soft. For a moment, Alice lost consciousness. When she opened her eyes, Alice stared straight up at a starlit sky. She was in such a daze that she started looking for familiar patterns: the Big Dipper, Orion….But she didn’t see them. The stars were in completely the wrong places. She was looking at the sky of another world.
After a moment, Alice realized that even stranger than the stars was the presence of three crescent moons in the sky. One big and two slightly smaller. The largest of the moon slivers was about four times the size of the one in her own world. And there were two full moons as well. A world with five moons, Alice thought in wonder.
Next Alice realized that she was very warm. She was sweating in her winter coat and snow pants, so she began removing them. Sitting up, she found she was resting on soft grass. Alice stroked it with her hand. It was more silken than any grass she had ever touched.
After taking off her outer layers, Alice felt so tired that she lay down on the grass. The warm night stirred around her, and she thought she could hear faint singing that smelled of roses.
This is the strangest dream I’ve ever had, Alice thought.
And then something familiar flew above her head. The dragonfly with the rainbow wings. It hovered in the air over her face and looked at her with golden eyes. Alice was just about to give the dragonfly a happy greeting when suddenly it began to grow. Both sets of wings spread to the length of arms, its body stretched and spread, and its head became enormous. Then it began to transform.
Fur sprouted on its head, the antennae transformed into ears, and the wings folded along its back, becoming fur as well. The enormous golden insect eyes turned small and focused. Within moments, there were paws to either side of Alice’s shoulders, and on her face she could feel a warm breath that smelled of the forest and fresh game. The golden eyes of a wolf stared into hers.
Alice was so shocked she didn’t think to be afraid.
The wolf stared at her even more intently, and then she heard his low, slightly growling voice. Alice heard it as if in her head, in her thoughts.
Get up, it said. This isn’t a dream.
* * *
—
Alice set off following the wolf, who turned back occasionally as if urging her on. She knew that he had spoken the truth. This was not a dream. Alice wondered why she wasn’t terrified, but for some reason she just wasn’t. That was the strangest thing. She’d fallen through the snow into another world and didn’t know how she would get back or if she could at all. And her parents were probably already worried because she hadn’t come home. Alice didn’t think about that, though. Down to the hairs standing up on her skin, she knew that an adventure was begi
nning, just as she’d hoped. And she intended to enjoy everything that might happen as much as she could.
The grass was ending now, and ahead, tall trees with many branches rose toward the starry sky. A wrought iron fence separated the grass from the trees. Alice and the wolf approached a gate, which was full of ornate designs.
“What is this world?” Alice asked the wolf.
The wolf stopped and scratched behind his ear with one of his hind legs. Then he spoke again in his growl: Sisterland is the name of this world. And beyond that gate is the Garden of Secrets. There you must go alone. Shapeshifters are not allowed in the garden except by invitation.
“Are you a shapeshifter, then?” Alice asked. “What does that mean?”
It means that I am able to change my shape and travel between the worlds. Sometimes I am a dragonfly. Sometimes I am a wolf.
“Can I invite you in?” Alice asked.
She thought it would be much more fun to enter the garden and meet the adventures waiting there if she had someone to keep her company.
The wolf shook his head.
Not yet, he said. Only once you have become a full resident of the garden.
“Well, can you at least tell me something about what’s waiting for me in the garden? What is Sisterland anyway?” Alice asked.
You will see and experience it all yourself when you go in. Without knowing too much, you will be able to have an open mind. My task was only to lead you to this point.
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