A lyrical and bold YA debut about an underground magic system in San Francisco—and the lengths one girl is willing to go to protect the ones she loves.
THE VANISHING STATION
by Ana Ellickson
Amulet/Abrams, April 2024
Eighteen–year–old Filipino American Ruby Santos has been unmoored since her mother’s death. She can’t apply to art school like she’s always dreamed, and she and her father have had to move into the basement of their home and rent out the top floor while they work to pay back her mother’s hospital bills.
Then Ruby finds out her father has been living a secret life as a delivery person for a magical underworld—he “jumps” train lines to help deliver packages for a powerful family. Recently, he’s fallen behind on deliveries (and deeper into alcoholism), and if his debts aren’t satisfied, they’re going to take her mother’s house. In an effort to protect her father and save all that remains of her mother, Ruby volunteers to take over her dad’s station and start jumping train lines.
But this is no ordinary job. Ruby soon realizes that the trains are much more than doors to romance and adventure: they’re also doors to trafficking illicit goods and fierce rivalries. As she becomes more entangled with the magical underworld and the mysterious boy who’s helped her to learn magic, she realizes too late that she may be in over her head. Can she free her father and save her mother’s house? Or has she only managed to get herself pulled into the dangerous web her father was trapped in?
Ana Ellickson writes about fierce girls, family curses, and everyday magic. THE VANISHING STATION is her debut novel, inspired by daydreams about jumping portals in the San Francisco subway. Roman the Renegade–her graphic novel script about street art and Filipino monsters–was awarded the 2021 New Visions Honor by Lee & Low Books. She lives in sunny Santa Barbara.
Ximena Reale is certain of one thing: the only good pirate is a dead one.
Minna and Kaija live deep in the birch woods of northern Norway, hiding in the shadows since their mother was burned at the stake thirteen years ago. Sweet-tempered Kaija remembers life before the fire—the friendships, the comfort and warmth of community. Her magic is quiet, mostly charms to heal cuts and bruises. She’d happily give it up to have a normal life. Minna, though, was raised in smoke. She’s a witch through and through: full of power and unafraid of it, wrath always simmering just below the surface. When Kaija decides to return to the village where their mother died to make a new life for herself, Minna, in a rage, releases a curse to raze the community that’s taken everything from her. In doing so, she sets in motion a plot that could destroy Kaija and the new life she’s trying to build. But you can’t take back dark magic once it’s been released, and someone will have to burn. They are witches, after all.
Magic is fading from Wales—choked off by King Offa’s Dyke, the enemy earthworks that spans the entire border. Even the dragons have disappeared. And now an attack is imminent.