Verwandte Artikel zu Bonebag

9781662620003: Bonebag
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1662620004 ISBN 13: 9781662620003
Verlag: Astra Young Readers, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

In this riveting middle-grade fantasy, New York Times bestselling author David Elliott and E.M. Elliott tell the story of a forest-dwelling boy forced to confront the mysteries of his life.

★ Booklist, starred review
★ Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Trapped in a dark forest with his cold-hearted parents, Bonebag leads a cruel and isolated existence. However, he feels deep in his bones that things weren’t always this way: he has known happiness before. Why does it feel like it was in a past life?

When Bonebag discovers a locket that burns him to the touch, and a ghostly girl beckons him into the deep woods, he must grapple with the riddle of where he came from and how he came to be. Only then can he begin to rewrite his fate.

From New York Times bestselling author David Elliott and his son, E.M. Elliott, this powerful middle-grade fantasy will take readers on a quest that tackles the mystery of belonging with high-octane twists and turns along the way.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David Elliott is a New York Times bestselling author with over 35 published or soon-to-be published books to his name. These include his provocative novels-in-verse Bull, which received 6 starred reviews; Voices, which was a finalist for the American Library in Paris Book Prize, a Wall Street Best Book of the Year, and an NCTE Notable Verse Novel; the picture book Baabwa and Wooliam, illustrated by Melissa Sweet, which was a Cybils Award finalist, JLG selection, and the PW Best Book of the Year; three picture books in the This Orq series, which was published in more than eight foreign editions; and the critically acclaimed, award-winning poetry books On the Farm, In the Wild and, most recently, In the Woods.

E. M. Elliott studied film and creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Media Studies at The New School in New York. He previously worked as a script reader for two production houses in Los Angeles, and currently lives in Philadelphia with his wife, dog, and cat. This is his first book.

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1

They hadn’t eaten for two weeks.
Not that he blamed them. The foul-smelling, rancid mush, a concoction Modor called foddish, had been served at every meal he could remember. The only variation was the amount of grit he would hear grinding between the bottom of his spoon and the glaze of the bowl. Occasionally he would discover a tiny fist of gristle in the foddish, or a bone the size of a twig. When he was sure he wouldn’t be seen, he lifted his eyes from the table to watch the empty wooden spoon slowly ascend to Faeder’s lips and then lower to the full bowl.
Weren’t his parents hungry? He knew better than to ask. They had proven to him—and on more than one occasion—that they were fierce believers that children should be seen and not heard.
Faeder looked up from his bowl.
Bonebag diverted his own gaze to a smudge of dirt on his left wrist.
He could feel Faeder’s eyes on him.
When he could stand it no longer, he looked up but trained his attention on the corner behind Faeder where an ill-made broom, untouched for as long as he could remember, provided an anchor for the webs of yellow and black spiders that made their home there. With its crooked, thorny handle and brittle, loosely bound head, the broom was hardly better than the effort of an untrained child.
Faeder told Bonebag he was a broom maker. But as far as the boy knew, the man had never traveled to sell his wares. And no one had ever come to the clearing in the Scura min Scurse, the great forest that surrounded the crumbling cottage the boy called home. Not a single person. Not once. Not ever. Bonebag knew it didn’t add up, and he knew better than to ask why.
But if Faeder presented the boy with unanswered questions, Modor’s behavior perplexed him even more. The only thing he knew for certain was that the lumbering woman was not like other mothers. Or at least not like the only other mother he knew about, a woman called Marmee. If Marmee was a good example, it seemed to him that mothers were supposed to love their children. What he felt from Modor was not love. But it was not the opposite of love either. It was as if she were expecting something from him and was impatient to receive it.
He had read about Marmee in the Tatters, hi name for the scattered confusion of brittle pages he had discovered under his mattress in the loft. There were many such pages. Stained. Torn at the edges. Yellowed with age. Some with pictures. Some without. Most single. But some, loosely bound. His favorite recounted the adventures of a boy named Davie Balfour, whose wicked uncle caused him to be kidnapped and later shipwrecked on the rugged coast of some faraway land. Marmee’s story and the one about the shipwrecked boy seemed to be parts of much longer tales, but enough of Marmee’s was there for him to understand that she was a loving mother. She laughed when her daughters—there were only daughters in the family—were happy and wept when they were sad. Marmee was as different from Modor as violets were from the sumac that grew rampant in the Scura min Scurse.
Modor slammed a fist on the table.
“Eat!” she barked.
He took a bite and swallowed without tasting. It was best to do as she said, even if his thoughts were elsewhere.
As they were now.
He’d spotted a moonthing under the table. A beauty, too. At least twice as big as any of the others. But how to get it without Modor catching him? Or worse, Faeder.
He’d asked about these discs only once, the first time he found one balanced on the bottom rung of the ladder that led to his loft. It had been a day last week.
“Bonebag is like the cat,” Faeder had said in response.
Bonebag. The only name his parents had ever called him.
“Cat?” he’d asked. “What cat?”
“That curious one,” Faeder said.
The bruise on his thin shoulder was still visible.
Since that day, he’d found more of the strange, silver discs he’d named moonthings, smaller than the one under his chair, but made of the same hard, translucent material. This new one would make number twelve.
Keeping his upper body still, he inched his right foot forward. He was hoping to cover the moonthing with the sole of his broken sandal and silently draw it to him. Then he would invent a reason to bend down, hide the treasure in the palm of his hand, and shove it into the pocket of his ragged trousers. Maybe he would pretend to drop his spoon. But that would be risking a hard slap. Or worse. No. Better if he acted like he was brushing away one of the cockroaches that skittered about as if they were the rightful residents.
Both his parents’ eyes were on him now.
He stared straight ahead, his own eyes devoid of expression, his mouth relaxed in a straight line, the mask that experience had taught him was the safest to adopt whenever he was in their presence. He snailed his foot forward. Until . . . there! He could feel it—the moonthing, its hard edges curled slightly upward under his toes. Now all he had to do was—
Suddenly, Faeder slammed his fist on the table. The bowls jumped. His foot shot back under his stool. Faeder glared. But the boy needn’t have worried. It was only the signal that the meal was over.
The moonthing lay where it was.

2 His heart still pounding, he stood up, collected the bowls and carried them outside to the wash station. He set the bowls down in the dirt and primed the pump, working the handle until the rusty water reached the surface. The water was cold, coming from dark caverns far beneath the earth. Even on the warmest days, it caused him to shiver.
As he scraped the foddish from the bowls, he thought of the moonthings. What were they? Where had they come from?
Riddles. His life was filled with them. Faeder and his broom. Modor’s cold indifference. The moonthings. But there was one riddle in particular that puzzled him more than any of the others: he knew what it meant to be happy. Knew it in his very bones. It was like the memory of a friend he had never met. Or the shadow of an object he had never seen. How, he wondered, could he be familiar with something he himself had never experienced?
This was a question that plagued him, as persistent as the mosquitoes that swarmed in the Scura min Scurse. Even more mysterious were the images that came to him each time he asked it, images and sensations that felt as real as the sinking cottage walls.
These images appeared in his mind’s eye, always in the same order. First, the image of two beasts, horned creatures he had no name for. But from their colossal size, he knew they were possessed of incredible power. Huge and unmoving. Carved from the hardest stone. He had touched those magnificent animals once. He was sure of it. But how could that be? In all his years, he had never left the confines of the Scura.
Next came a heavy, six-paneled door painted in a vibrant, eye-popping red. With its golden doorknob engraved in a brilliant sunburst, it was a door so out of place in the Scura that he sometimes wondered how his imagination had produced it.
Often, the sight of this door was followed by the most fleeting of the three impressions. A sweet fragrance so short-lived that sometimes Bonebag wasn’t entirely sure he’d experienced it at all. The instant its delicate scent registered in his nostrils, it was gone. In the rare hours when he wasn’t doing chores, he’d made it his business to search every inch of the clearing, hoping to find the flower that was its source. But so far, no luck.
The strange, horned beasts, the red door, the mysterious fragrance bewildered him. They seemed to belong to another time, another place. That was impossible, of course. But no use thinking about all that now. The moonthing still lay under...

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Verlag
Astra Young Readers
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1662620004
ISBN 13 
9781662620003
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
320
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Verantwortliche Person
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