I am thrilled to be hosting a spot
on the PAOLA SANTIAGO AND THE SANCTUARY OF SHADOWS by Tehlor Kay Mejia Blog
Tour hosted by Rockstar
Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!
About the Book
Author: Tehlor Kay Mejia
Pub. Date: August 2, 2022
Publisher: Rick Riordan Presents
Formats: Hardcover, eBook, Audiobook
Pages: 352
Find it: Goodreads, Amazon, Kindle, Audible, B&N, iBooks, Kobo, TBD, Bookshop.org
Best-selling author Rick Riordan presents Tehlor Kay Mejia's third chilling story based on Mexican folklore. This time Paola Santiago faces El Cucuy, aka the Boogeyman.
"Paola Santiago is a whip-smart Latina who dares to explore the shadows
between folklore and middle-school friendship. A thrilling
adventure."--Nina Moreno, author of Don't Date Rosa Santos
Paola Santiago has recently returned from Oregon, where she defeated the
Hitchhiker ghost and saved her father from the vengeful spirit that was
possessing him. The poor girl deserves a rest! But first she has to rescue
Dante from the void, where he’s been imprisoned by some unknown force. Even
though Dante has turned against Pao, she can’t just leave him there--they’ve
been friends for too long.
Paola’s prophetic dreams seem to have dried up, so she has to find other ways
to locate a new rift where she can enter the void. Signs point to Texas--but
how is she going to get there from Arizona? It just so happens that Emma’s new
group of politically active friends, the Rainbow Rogues, are planning a field
trip to San Antonio. It’s the perfect ruse for Paola, if she can stand being
with the judgmental girls for that many days. . . .
Relying on her wits, training from the Ninos de la Luz, and the emotional
support of her best friend Emma, Pao makes it into the void. Once there she
must face down not just one but two enemies: El Cucuy, the bogeyman . . . and
someone even scarier who looks a lot like Pao herself.
This third exciting journey into Mexican folklore has our lovable, intrepid
protagonist making discoveries both wonderous and fearsome.
Grab the first 2 books in the PAOLA
SANTIAGO now!
Book 1 is FREE with a Kindle Unlimited Subscription!
ONE
Poor Patrick
“You got
this, Pao!”
“Take him
down!”
“On your
left!”
Paola
Santiago barely heard the noise of the small crowd as she faced down her
opponent. He was already missing an arm, his head was tragically
lopsided, and he moved in the jerky, unpredictable way Pao had come to
associate with drunk people—or toddlers who really needed a nap.
Despite his
erratic movements, Pao tightened her grip on her Arma del Alma, a long,
shining staff with a viciously bladed end. Let your opponent come to
you, said her father’s voice in her head. Let them expend their
energy circling and crossing the space and striking. Be still water,
ready to ripple or wave. Wasting nothing.
Her opponent
had almost reached her, and every part of Pao screamed that she should
strike now—leap across the space and finish the job of severing his
wobbling head. But instead she waited like still water, until finally, finally
she was allowed to rush forward and stab through the neck. Then she
heard the satisfying crunch that meant his head had hit the
ground.
Pao felt no
remorse, only victory, as she lifted her sweaty face, pushed her bangs
back, and waited for her well-deserved accolades.
“Oh
no!”
“Poor
Patrick!”
“Someone get
some tape, stat!”
Three Niños
rushed past Pao in a blur as she groaned, sinking onto the concrete
floor. Her magical staff was already shrinking of its own accord into a
travel-size magnifying glass she could fit in her pocket.
“Well, I thought
it was impressive,” said a voice from behind her, and Pao turned with a
smile to see her best friend Emma Lockwood approaching with a water
bottle, her eyes dancing with laughter.
“These milk
drinkers wouldn’t know impressive if it cut off their heads,” Pao
grumbled, taking the water gratefully and chugging half of it before
dumping the rest on her sweaty neck.
“If you
wanted the Niños to be on your side, you probably shouldn’t have named
the sparring dummy,” Emma said as they surveyed the scene.
The ragtag
group of kids and teenagers who called themselves Los Niños de la Luz were
already on her side, Pao knew. And, as her town’s protectors against the
monstrous creatures of the void, they were important allies to
have.
Not just for
their warehouse headquarters, either. Though it was pretty awesome. The
rafters in its ceiling were nearly thirty feet above their heads. The
glossy concrete floor was painted and taped with complicated diagrams of
footwork, advances, and retreats, all color-coded according to types of
creature. Best of all, it was in a part of town far from any prying eyes.
Ideal for monster-hunting practice.
Of course,
at the moment, the only creature in sight was an old dummy on a rolling
cart. And he was currently missing a head.
“Patrick,”
Pao said, rolling her eyes at her own folly. “What kind of a name is Patrick
for a monster anyway?” “Hey, there are a lot of Patricks in the world,”
Emma replied. “I’m sure at least some of them are monsters.”
Pao couldn’t
argue with that, so she got to her feet and walked over to a section of
school gym bleachers that her friend Naomi had “liberated” from Silver
Springs High. Then she flopped down, her muscles burning from a long day
of training.
“How do you
feel?” Emma asked, her eyes x-raying Pao. They looked even bluer than
usual against her pumpkin-orange sweatshirt. Despite the fact that it was still
over a hundred degrees in Silver Springs, Emma was determined to show her
fall spirit.
Pao thought
about changing the subject to actual pumpkins, or costumes, or Halloween
baking or crafts, all subjects she knew would distract the girl in front
of her. But she’d never been able to lie to Emma, or avoid her questions
for long, so she told the truth. As much of it as she could bear to say
out loud, anyway.
“I’m
frustrated,” she said, kicking her white sneakers against the bench. “I’m
restless. I can take Patrick’s head off fifteen times a day, and it’s not
gonna get us any closer to rescuing Dante.”
At the sound
of their ex–best friend’s name, Emma went quiet for a moment, and Pao
knew she was remembering things, too. Things like the trailer laboratory
the two of them had found in the middle of the Oregon forest last winter.
And the man inside, who’d been Pao’s long-lost father and not her
father all at once.
Pao had told
Emma everything, of course. All the gory details Emma hadn’t seen while
she waited outside the trailer. About finding out La Llorona was not only
the ghost-deity Pao had defeated in the void, she was also Pao’s grandmother!
That part
had taken a little explaining. See, after drowning her three children in
the river, La Llorona had found a way to bring them back to life by
merging their souls with those of living victims. Her twisted experiment
had only worked on her second son, Beto, which, Pao discovered, was her
father’s true identity.
Only, the
experiment (like most things La Llorona did) had gone pretty horribly
wrong. Beto had run away in horror from his mother, changed his name, and
tried to bury his past. But over time the soul his was bound to—a boy
victim of La Llorona’s named Joaquin—started to become more dominant . .
. and resentful.
Eventually,
Joaquin had hatched a plan to use Pao’s connection to the void to tear open its
fabric and let out every loathsome creature inside to feed on the living.
Luring her to the forest by using Dante as bait . . .
Working with
Beto, Pao had managed to free Joaquin’s soul, put an end to his awful
plot, and get her friends back to safety. All except Dante, who, fed by
his own jealousy and anger, had gone willingly into the void and remained
there.
Even with
the Niños’ centuries of knowledge about the void and its inhabitants, her
father’s memories of Joaquin’s machinations, and Pao’s own growing desperation
to smash her way into that terrible place by whatever means necessary,
they still hadn’t managed to rescue him. It had already been eight
months. “We’re going to find him,” Emma said at last, putting a hand on
Pao’s shoulder. “You said yourself that whoever is keeping Dante wouldn’t
want to give up the leverage they have over you by killing him, so it’s
just a matter of—”
“Of finding
a way in,” Pao said, almost to herself. She had fallen asleep repeating
that truth to herself over and over every night since January. But the
months kept going by, and Pao’s faith in her own understanding of the
situation was flagging by the day.
Joaquin had
told her, while tied to a chair in his trailer lab, that the void wanted
her, La Llorona’s granddaughter, who had twice defied its soldiers, who
had snatched three living souls from its depths and was determined to
take a fourth. But if the void wanted her so bad, why hadn’t it shown her
how to enter it again? Why wasn’t it using Dante to lure her back?
She hadn’t
had a single vision of its ghost-riddled depths since she’d returned from
Oregon. Not one. And she couldn’t help but wonder why her dreams, the
connection that had allowed her to save her friends and family before,
had deserted her now, at this crucial juncture.
Though Pao
didn’t exactly want to be the descendent of an evil ghost woman
who had drowned countless children, or to belong, in part, to the spooky,
monster-ridden place that had given her power, she couldn’t help feeling
a little abandoned.
Not that she
could ever admit that to Emma. Or anyone else. “It’s my dad, mostly,” Pao said
when the silence had stretched out a beat longer than she could stand.
“He wants to act like I’m just this normal kid, like I shouldn’t be
getting involved with paranormal stuff, even though I saved his life by
getting involved with it. I wish he would just let me be who I am.”
Before Emma
could get to one of the fourteen solutions to this problem she had
undoubtedly brainstormed in the past ten seconds, Pao’s stomach grumbled,
and they both laughed.
“Come on,”
Emma said, getting to her feet, the bleachers groaning under her bright
green sneakers with the rainbow laces. “Let’s get out of here. Ice cream?
Pizza?”
As much as
Pao wanted to hold on to her frustration, to sit here and stew, the
appeal of a pizza was pretty undeniable. “Okay,” she relented. “But first
I have to talk to the biggest jerk in Arizona. Wait for me
outside?”
“I’ll be the
one with the sparkly purple bike.”
When Pao
opened the door to the warehouse’s attached office, Franco was sitting in
front of what appeared to be a super-old computer, but Pao knew it was an
invention of her father’s—a machine that could read magical signatures
and measure the intensity of the energy they gave off.
Hopefully
the computer couldn’t measure the waves of irritation coming off Pao, because
she thought the strength of them would probably break it.
“Franco,”
she said when it became clear he wasn’t going to acknowledge her presence
beyond a wary glance. “Find anything new?”
“I’m sure
Beto would have told you if we had,” he said curtly. “I . . . He’s not really .
. . I’m asking you,” Pao stammered, feeling her face heat up. You’d think
that living with a man who’d been studying the paranormal for both of
his lives would have put her at the forefront of the Niños’ activities,
but Pao had been relegated to perpetual trainee. Which meant fighting dummies
and having her questions constantly brushed aside.
Franco
didn’t answer at first, just stabbed the buttons on the field unit in his
hand a little harder than Pao felt was necessary. But she’d learned from
months in this grumpy boy’s company that he could never resist the urge
to talk about his work for long, so she waited, counting down from ten in
her head.
When she got
to six, he pushed back from the desk with a huff. “The whole map’s a
blank! I thought the thing in B.C. was an anomaly, but every known
entrance to the void that we’ve mapped in the past fifty years is gone.
Just disappeared.”
Pao stilled
at the mention of Canada. It had been their first trip after they
returned from saving Beto. An expedition to the only known void entrance
on the West Coast—besides the Gila River one Pao and her friends had
destroyed the summer before. Based on Pao’s dreams, Beto and Franco had
been sure the machines were misreading things, that the void
entrance would be there even though no evidence of it could be
seen.
They’d all
been so hopeful, she remembered. So sure they would get through. That they’d
bring Dante back, and this whole nightmare would be over. They’d prepared
for months, and Pao had brandished her Arma del Alma without a doubt
in her mind, the still-chilly March winds cutting through her sad
excuse for a winter coat.
Most of the
Niños had been forced to stay behind, their status as lost, escaped,
forgotten, or otherwise fugitive children making it difficult for them to
travel, so Pao, her father, and Franco (who’d been a smug teenager for a
hundred years now) had made their way through the snowy woods outside
British Columbia to find . . .
Nothing.
No liminal
space. No monsters. No evidence—besides a black scorch mark on the
ground—that there’d ever been a portal to the malevolent underworld
there.
To cover his
disappointment, Franco had tried asking the locals living near the void
entrance about what had happened, but everyone they’d approached had,
frustratingly, clammed up instantly at the sight of them. They all
categorically denied that they’d ever seen, heard, or experienced
anything strange.
That was
when, Pao remembered, Franco had started looking at her differently.
And maybe it
was also when her dad had started his all training/no-telling-Pao-anything
protocol.
Now Pao
wanted to growl like a feral animal, or at least hit something that
wasn’t headless Patrick. Instead she waited as Franco looked at her with
that distrustful, suspicious expression. She tried to avoid it by studying the
walls covered in maps, notes, and theories that had been crossed out one
by one.
“Any chance
it’s the instruments malfunctioning?” she asked, just to break the
horrible silence between them that seemed to be growing fangs by the
second.
“It’s not
the instruments that can’t be trusted,” he said coldly, turning
his back in clear dismissal, and Pao left the office feeling like she
always did after an interaction with Franco—like she was somehow
contaminated. Like she’d failed to live up to even his low expectations
of her.
“Pipsqueak?”
The voice drifted across the massive parking lot before Pao could turn
the corner that would lead her to Emma. The sky beyond the warehouse was
almost dark, the days get ting shorter now that winter was on its way again.
“Hey, Naomi,” Pao said, not bothering to disguise her bad mood. Naomi, the
queen of bad moods, could hardly hold it against her.
“Isn’t it
past your bedtime? Papi Precioso must be waiting.” Pao rolled her eyes as she
approached. Naomi was sitting on the concrete steps out front, smirking
down at her. “What? Trouble behind the white picket fence?” Naomi’s tone
was teasing, but after the two of them had traveled hundreds of miles together,
traversed a haunted forest, and fought more than one warped fantasma
together, Pao could tell there was a grudging respect beneath her casual
mocking. “It’s fine,” Pao said, shaking her head. “Just sick of being
treated like a baby all the time.”
“I’ve been
saying it since the beginning, tourist,” Naomi said, eyeing Pao with that
surprisingly adept intuition of hers. “Once you cross over, it’s hard to
go back to normal life.”
Pao was
quiet for a long minute, appreciating the fact that Naomi did not insist
on filling every moment with chatter. Emma, as much as Pao loved her, had
never met a problem she couldn’t immediately offer several solutions
for, and sometimes Pao just needed to stew.
“It’s just .
. .” Pao said at last. “Dad expects me to be so grateful he’s here. He says I
don’t need to worry anymore, that he and Franco can take care of
everything. But where would either of them be if I hadn’t taken charge?
Why does he want to force me back into a life I don’t fit into
anymore?”
Naomi got to
her feet, offering Pao a high five as she turned toward the warehouse
door. “Look, Beto’s not a bad guy, from what I’ve seen. But you know how
I feel about Franco, and about men and their I’ve got this under
control, little girl crap in general.
If you want
to go after hero boy yourself, you know I’m on your right.”
“Thanks,”
Pao said, not trusting herself to say more. The fact that Naomi would be
willing to follow her out into the fray again, even after all that had
befallen them on their last attempt to join forces, meant more than Pao
was willing to admit at the moment.
And Pao
would have taken her up on the offer, she realized. In a heartbeat. If
only she had any idea where to begin.
About Tehlor Kay Mejia:
TEHLOR KAY MEJIA is a bestselling and award winning author of
young adult and middle grade fiction.
Her debut young adult novel, WE SET THE DARK ON FIRE, received six starred reviews, as well as the Oregon Spirit Book Award for debut fiction, and the Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award runner up honor for debut speculative fiction. It has been featured on Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, and O by Oprah Magazine’s best books lists, and was a 2019 book of the year selection by Kirkus and School Library Journal. Its sequel, WE UNLEASH THE MERCILESS STORM, followed to continuing acclaim, while MISS METEOR (co-written with National Book Award Nominee Anna-Marie McLemore) was named to the American Library Association’s 2021 Rainbow List, honoring outstanding contributions in LGBTQIA teen fiction.
Tehlor’s debut middle grade novel, PAOLA SANTIAGO AND THE RIVER OF TEARS, was published by the Rick Riordan Presents imprint at Disney/Hyperion. It received four starred reviews, and was named Amazon’s best book of 2020 in the 9-12 age range. It is currently in development at Disney as a television series to be produced by Eva Longoria.
Tehlor lives with her daughter, partner, and two small dogs in Oregon, where she grows heirloom corn and continues her quest to perfect the vegan tamale. She is active on Twitter and Instagram @tehlorkay.
Website | Twitter | Instagram | TikTok | Goodreads | Amazon | BookBub
Giveaway Details:
1 winner
will receive a finished copy of PAOLA SANTIAGO AND THE SANCTUARY OF SHADOWS, US Only.
Ends September 6th, midnight EST.
a Rafflecopter giveawayTour Schedule:
Week One:
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8/1/2022 |
IG Post |
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8/2/2022 |
Excerpt |
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8/3/2022 |
Excerpt |
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8/4/2022 |
Excerpt/IG Post |
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8/5/2022 |
Excerpt |
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8/6/2022 |
Review/IG Post |
Week Two:
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8/7/2022 |
Review/IG Post |
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8/8/2022 |
Review/IG Post |
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8/9/2022 |
Review/IG Post |
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8/10/2022 |
Review/IG Post |
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8/11/2022 |
Review/IG Post |
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8/12/2022 |
Review/IG Post |
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8/13/2022 |
Review/IG Post |
Week Three:
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8/14/2022 |
Excerpt |
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8/15/2022 |
Review/IG Post |
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8/16/2022 |
Review/IG Post |
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8/17/2022 |
Excerpt/IG Post |
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8/18/2022 |
Review/IG Post/TikTok Post |
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8/19/2022 |
Excerpt/IG Post |
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8/20/2022 |
Excerpt/IG Post |
Week Four:
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8/21/2022 |
Review/IG Post |
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8/22/2022 |
Excerpt |
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8/23/2022 |
IG Post |
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8/24/2022 |
Review/IG Post |
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8/25/2022 |
IG Review/Read Part of Book Out Loud |
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8/26/2022 |
Review/IG Post |
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8/27/2022 |
Review/IG Post/TikTok Post |
Week Five:
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8/28/2022 |
IG Post |
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8/29/2022 |
Review/IG Post |
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8/30/2022 |
Review/IG Post |
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8/31/2022 |
IG Review/TikTok Post |
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