Something is Wrong with the Sky

Etta's mother has never seen the village. She's never asked to. For four years, she has asked only one question - "How's the village?" - and listened to her daughter's answer like news from a real country.Because it is one. Etta made Everwick when she was seven - drew its maps, wrote its almanacs, invented its festivals, its families, its founding stories, even its language - and somewhere along the way, through a gap in the hedge at the bottom of the garden, it became real. A river valley she can walk into. Villagers who have lived their whole lives under its bell tower. Harvests, weddings, winters - sixty years of history grown from a child's notebooks. And one thing no one in Everwick knows: their sky, the weather they thank and wonder at, is Etta herself. The valley's climate is an eleven-year-old girl's own heart.Then a word comes into Etta's house that changes everything on both sides of the hedge. As her mother begins the long fight of her life, winter falls on Everwick - early, strange, and wrong - and a village that has never once been told what its sky is must find a way to keep faith with it in the dark.A story about two worlds wintering together, about what families carry and how they carry it, and about the oldest law of every lit window: you keep the lamp burning for the one who can't see it.