Lucretia and the Kroons

Amazon.com Review"Being young doesn't protect you. Horrors come for kids, too" is a lesson Lucretia "Loochie" Gardner learns the hard way in this gripping novella. Loochie is a plucky 12-year-old from Queens living in an apartment complex rife with rumored creatures from the underworld. She struggles to come to terms with her best friend Sunny's ongoing battle with cancer, as the two have been inseparable for years. When Sunny returns home from her latest round of treatment, the girls make a plan to hang out at Loochie's--without parental supervision. But Sunny doesn't show, and Loochie dives into twisted waters in her quest to find her best friend. This fantastical tale by widely-praised novelist Victor LaValle is about children, but markedly for grownups. The author writes as though he too has faced the sobering horrors that childhood can contain. LaValle allows Loochie's heroism real complexity. Encounters with demented crackheads, winged rats and haunted playgrounds push Loochie to confront her many fears, but none are quite as scary as knowing she may lose Sunny forever. --Raya JalabiProduct DescriptionFrom one of the most acclaimed young writers of fiction in America today comes a fast-paced and fantastical novella about a young girl’s journey into a dark netherworld to find her missing best friend. This eBook edition contains an exclusive excerpt from Victor LaValle’s new novel The Devil in Silver, about which Gary Shteyngart raves, “Literary horror just found a new master.” Lucretia’s best friend and upstairs neighbor Sunny—a sweet pitbull of a kid, even as she struggles with a mysterious illness—has gone missing. The only way to get her back is for Lucretia to climb the rickety fire escape of their Queens tenement and crawl through the window of apartment 6D, portal to a vast shadowland of missing kids ruled by a nightmarish family of mutants whose designs on the children are unknown. Her search for Sunny takes Lucretia through a dark fantasyland where she finds lush forests growing from concrete, pigeon-winged rodents, and haunted playgrounds. Her quest ultimately forces her to confront the most frightening specter of all: losing, forever, the thing you love the most.Lucretia and the Kroons is a dazzlingly imaginative adventure story and a moving exploration of the power of friendship and the terror of loss. This all-new novella serves as the perfect companion piece to The Devil in Silver, a thrillingly suspenseful work of literary horror that continues the story of Lucretia.Advance praise for *The Devil in Silver “The Devil in Silver is the rare work that takes seemingly disparate parts and brings them together seamlessly into something entirely original. There is madness here, and it is infused with brilliance, and the result is a story that is as illuminating as it is entertaining.”—Mat Johnson, author of Pym*