Blood and Salt

Gr 9 Up—Dead bodies in a cornfield in the middle of Kansas, a mysterious ritual centuries in the making, visions of a dead girl, and the sinister plotting of an immortal Francisco Vázquez de Coronado all conspire to turn New York City teen Ash Larkin's life upside down in this complicated but original paranormal tale. Ash and her twin brother take off for Kansas to find their mother, who has decided to return to the cult she escaped when she was pregnant with them. Their spotty knowledge of family history and Ash's increasingly disturbing visions about her ancestors do not prepare the siblings for the people in the insular community of Quivira, who have clearly been waiting for them. Thrown into the center of a ritual she does not understand, Ash must sort through violent visions of 16th-century love, loss, and betrayal in order to find her mother and protect her brother. Help comes in the form of a handsome boy she's not sure she can trust. What readers know of the key players' complex histories and motivations changes as things are revealed to Ash in her visions, which makes the narrative difficult to follow at times. However, Liggett keeps things moving along with plenty of sexy, frightening, and funny moments. While the history gets a bit convoluted, the idea that when Coronado wandered into Kansas looking for gold, he stumbled across immortality and is still around, pulling puppet strings in a doomsday cult, is too good to pass up.