Pucker

**This young adult fantasy novel will take you from the lonely places in a boy’s soul to a miraculous world of infinite possibility and frightening temptation. “A high-voltage story of great imagination and beauty . . . right from the start we are under his skin and in for the ride.”—Adele Griffin, author of Where I Want to Be “Pucker resonates with vital truths about how we challenge our own fate, reshape our own past, and—sometimes—find our own way home.”—Scott Westerfeld, author of So Yesterday and Peeps** Thomas Quicksilver, known to his classmates as “Pucker,” has always been an outsider. His crazy mother, the secret of his family’s strange origins, and above all, the terrible scars on his face from a childhood fire—these things have kept Thomas isolated and alone. Now, at seventeen, a quest to save his dying mother takes Thomas back to his birthplace, an alternate world called Isaura from which he and his mother were exiled nine years earlier. In Isaura, Thomas’s scars will be magically healed. He will learn what it is to be desirable. He will fall in love for the first time. And he will face a devastating, impossible choice.