Rena Barron

A girl with no gifts must bargain for the power to fight her own mother’s dark schemes—even if the price is her life. Heir to two lines of powerful witchdoctors, Arrah yearns for magic of her own. Yet she fails at bone magic, fails to call upon her ancestors, and fails to live up to her family’s legacy. Under the disapproving eye of her mother, the Kingdom’s most powerful priestess and seer, she fears she may never be good enough. But when the Kingdom’s children begin to disappear, Arrah is desperate enough to turn to a forbidden, dangerous ritual. If she has no magic of her own, she’ll have to buy it—by trading away years of her own life. Arrah’s borrowed power reveals a nightmarish betrayal, and on its heels, a rising tide of darkness that threatens to consume her and all those she loves. She must race to unravel a twisted and deadly scheme… before the fight costs more than she can afford.

A king with a score to settle. A demon driven to rebel. A girl who holds the power of the gods. Arrah has paid many prices in her battle against the Demon King. Now, she must decipher the legacy of her past and weave an uneasy alliance between her beloved Rudjek, the Demon King, and the remaining orishas, hoping to restore peace to all their worlds. But as Arrah’s half-demon sister regains her strength and resumes her quest for destruction, peace may require the ultimate sacrifice.

In the thrilling third and final book in the acclaimed Maya and the Rising Dark trilogy that Kirkus calls "truly #BlackGirlMagic," Maya must face off with the Lord of Shadows to save the human world from impending war with the Dark. War is coming. Despite everything Maya and her father have done, the veil that protects the human world is failing. The Lord of Shadows has raised an army powerful enough to challenge the orishas. And it's only a matter of time before he breaks through the veil and destroys Maya's neighborhood and the rest of the world. Maya and her friends aren't going down without a fight. She's honing her guardian powers, with the help of two new allies--her long lost guardian sister and a mysterious darkbringer (who might be a double agent). But when an attack hits close to home, Maya doesn't have any more time to prepare. She must face the Lord of Shadows or risk losing everything. With her friends--Eli, Frankie, Zeran, and Eleni--by her side, Maya leads the charge in an epic showdown that takes her across worlds and to the edge of the universe. Will she succeed or will Darkness prevail, once and for all?

In this highly anticipated sequel, Maya and the godlings must return to the sinister world of The Dark to retrieve the one thing keeping the veil between the worlds from crumbling: her father's soul. Perfect for fans of Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky and Willia of the Wood. The threat from The Dark is far from over. Twelve-year-old Maya knows this. After crossing the veil between the two worlds, saving her father, and narrowly escaping the sinister clutches of the Lord of Shadows, tensions between the human world and The Dark are higher than ever. And even worse, Maya’s orisha powers as a godling are out of control. Now a guardian in training, Maya spends her days patching up veils with her father and cleaning up near-disasters like baby wormholes that her erratic powers create. But when Maya and her friends discover that something went terribly wrong during their journey to bring her father back to the human world, they are forced to return to The Dark and restore what they left behind, the one thing keeping the veil from falling: her father’s soul. The Lord of Shadows is mobilizing his forces for an all-out war against the human world. And this time, Maya and her friends will need all the help they can get. Even if that means teaming up with their greatest enemies, the darkbringers.

Twelve-year-old Maya’s search for her missing father puts her at the center of a battle between our world, the Orishas, and the mysterious and sinister Dark world. Twelve-year-old Maya is the only one in her South Side Chicago neighborhood who witnesses weird occurrences like werehyenas stalking the streets at night and a scary man made of shadows plaguing her dreams. Her friends try to find an explanation—perhaps a ghost uprising or a lunchroom experiment gone awry. But to Maya, it sounds like something from one of Papa’s stories or her favorite comics.When Papa goes missing, Maya is thrust into a world both strange and familiar as she uncovers the truth. Her father is the guardian of the veil between our world and the Dark—where an army led by the Lord of Shadows, the man from Maya’s nightmares, awaits. Maya herself is a godling, half orisha and half human, and her neighborhood is a safe haven. But now that the veil is failing, the Lord of Shadows is determined to destroy the human world and it’s up to Maya to stop him. She just hopes she can do it in time to attend Comic-Con before summer’s over.

After so many years yearning for the gift of magic, Arrah has the one thing she’s always wanted—at a terrible price. Now the last surviving witchdoctor, she’s been left to pick up the shattered pieces of a family that betrayed her, a kingdom in shambles, and long-buried secrets about who she is. Desperate not to repeat her mother’s mistakes, Arrah must return to the tribal lands to search for help from the remnants of her parents’ people. But the Demon King’s shadow looms closer than she thinks. And as Arrah struggles to unravel her connection to him, defeating him begins to seem more and more impossible—if it’s something she can bring herself to do at all. Set in a richly imagined world inspired by spine-tingling tales of voodoo and folk magic, Kingdom of Souls was lauded as “masterful” by School Library Journal in a starred review. This explosively epic sequel will have readers racing to the can’t-miss conclusion.

Ambientada en un mundo inspirado en cuentos de vudú y magia popular, el debut de Rena Barron es el comienzo de una emocionante saga sobre una joven atrapada entre dioses, monstruos y la maldición del poder. Descendiente de un linaje de poderosos hechiceros, Arrah anhela su propia magia. Sin embargo, falla en el ritual para obtener la magia de sus ancestros y no está a la altura del legado de su familia. Bajo la mirada de desaprobación de su madre, la sacerdotisa y vidente más poderosa del reino, teme nunca ser lo bastante buena. Pero cuando los niños del reino comienzan a desaparecer, Arrah está lo suficientemente desesperada como para recurrir a un ritual prohibido y peligroso. Si no tiene magia propia, tendrá que comprarla, intercambiando años de su propia vida. El poder prestado de Arrah revela una traición de pesadilla y una marea creciente de oscuridad que amenaza con consumirla a ella y a todos los que ama.