Cristin Bishara

When Samira receives a strange vase with some ancient coins, she and her sister Rima are pulled into Baalbek, a Phoenician underworld where they are caught up in the a struggle between deities, shapeshifters, and ghouls--and Eshmun, who wants his obol, his burial coin, back.

Vial of Tears

If you could step into a parallel universe, what would you give up for the perfect life?

Relativity

Two sisters become trapped in the underworld—and in the machinations of deities, shapeshifters, and ghouls—in this lush and dangerous Phoenician mythology-inspired fantasy. A Kirkus Reviews Best Young Adult Book of the Year Teenage sisters Samira and Rima aren't exactly living the dream. Instead, they live with their maddeningly unreliable mother in a rundown trailer in Michigan. Dad's dead, money's tight, and Mom disappears to gamble for days at a time. So when Sam's grandfather wills her the family valuables—a cache of Lebanese antiquities—she's desperate enough to try pawning them before Mom can. But she shouldn't. Because one is cursed, forbidden, the burial coin of a forgotten god. Disturbing it condemns her and Rima to the Phoenician underworld, a place of wicked cities, burning forests, poisoned feasts of milk and lemons, and an endless, windless ocean. Nothing is what it seems. No one is who they say. And down here, the night never ends. To get home—and to keep her sister safe—Sam will have to outwit beautiful shapeshifters, pose as a royal bride, sail the darkest sea... and maybe kill the god of death himself. A lush and intensely imaginative novel in which fierce women protect each other from rapacious gods and hungering demons, and in which two tenacious sisters come into their power, Vial of Tears introduces readers to the rich and brilliant mythology of ancient Lebanon. A Den of Geek Top New YA A Shelf Awareness Galley Love of the Week Selection

If Ruby Wright could have her way, her dad would never have met and married her stepmother Willow, her best friend George would be more than a friend, and her mom would still be alive. Ruby knows wishes can't come true; some things just can't be undone. Then she discovers a tree in the middle of an Ohio cornfield with a wormhole to nine alternative realities. Suddenly, Ruby can access completely different realities, each containing variations of her life-if things had gone differently at key moments. The windshield wiper missing her mother's throat...her big brother surviving his ill-fated birth...her father never having met Willow. Her ideal world-one with everything and everyone she wants most-could be within reach. But is there such a thing as a perfect world? What is Ruby willing to give up to find out?

Cristin Bishara

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