A World Apart

About the Book

Twelve-year-old Lindsay Wexler has never known any relatives besides her parents and four-year-old brother, Elliot. She never met her great-uncle, Eldridge Tetla, who ran the family bookstore in a small upstate New York town. And now that Great-Uncle Eldridge has died and left them the bookstore, she will never have a chance to meet him.  But Lindsay discovers that nothing is quite as she was led to believe. For one thing, Eldridge Tetla isn’t dead, he is only missing. Then there is the locked cupboard with no keyhole, and the book that won’t open, and that annoying ten-year-old twerp, James, who spends all of his time in the bookstore.

Late one night, Great-Uncle Eldridge’s cat, Bear (in a purely catlike manner) urges Lindsay to sneak downstairs into the bookstore to examine the sealed book she inherited. There she discovers James hiding from his abusive father. A collision of circumstances culminates in Lindsay and James following a strange girl through a doorway into another world.  The door closes behind them.

Gaiasisperan is a magical world whose darkest powers have lain dormant for decades. Lindsay and James are thrown together with twelve-year-old Maalya (MAHL’ ya) in a terrible race against time to stop the reawakened powers from destroying Gaiasisperan. Gaiasisperan is being shaken to bits by repeated earthquakes that reverberate in Lindsay’s world.  It becomes clear that Great-Uncle Eldridge is at the heart of the disaster.  Starting with a book of power that only Lindsay can open, and a magical stone that appears to be growing, the quarrelsome trio acquires the aid of an enormous pig, an enigmatic man in blue jeans and a cowboy hat, and a former enemy.  Together, they face down their own demons while helping each other to save the world from a catastrophic abuse of power.

A WORLD APART lies somewhere between Madeline L’Engle’s WRINKLE IN TIME and J.  K.  Rowling’s HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE in its mixture of the contemporary and magical, and in its leavening of a serious story with dashes of humor.  It is written for middle-grade readers from age ten on up.

About the Author

Lisa Wright began writing in the mid 1980s at about the same time she began working at Oblong Books and Music, an independent bookstore in upstate New York. Initially drawn to children’s books, she discovered that her original fairy tales appealed most to whimsical adults. A self-taught bookbinder, she hand-binds small editions of the individual tales, available at wrightales.com. Her young adult fantasy, A World Apart, is also available through Xlibris.com and you can listen to her reading her stories at www.podiobooks.com.