“I loved every speck of it.” —Kelly Barnhill, Newbery Medal–winning author of The Girl Who Drank the Moon From New York Tim e s bestselling author Catherynne M. Valente comes an inventive middle grade fantasy that follows a boy journeying away from the only home he’s ever known and into the magical realm of the dead to fulfill a bargain for his people. Osmo Unknown hungers for the world beyond his small town. With the life that Littlebridge society has planned for him, the only taste Osmo will ever get are his visits to the edge of the Fourpenny Woods where his mother hunts. Until the unthinkable happens: his mother accidentally kills a Quidnunk, a fearsome and intelligent creature that lives deep in the forest. None of this should have anything to do with poor Osmo, except that a strange treaty was once formed between the Quidnunx and the people of Littlebridge to ensure that neither group would harm the other. Now that a Quidnunk is dead, as the firstborn child of the hunter who killed her, Osmo must embark on a quest to find the Eightpenny Woods—the mysterious kingdom where all wild forest creatures go when they die—and make amends. Accompanied by a very rude half-badger, half-wombat named Bonk and an antisocial pangolin girl called Never, it will take all of Osmo’s bravery and cleverness to survive the magic of the Eightpenny Woods to save his town…and make it out alive. “Charmingly dark and darkly charming, a fairy tale that veers between the almost familiar and the wildly unexpected, Valente’s story will delight any reader who is both fierce and gentle, wild and mild, fond of wombats and pangolins and all manner of strange beasts.” -- Ursula Vernon, author of Castle Hangnail “Valente takes us on a wild journey through the absurd, the mundane, the outlandish, the silly, and the strange, often turning us on our heads. I loved every speck of it.” -- Kelly Barnhill, author of the New York Times bestselling Newbery Medal Winner The Girl Who Drank the Moon * "This imagination- and description-rich tale is for those enamored by The Phantom Tollbooth and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It’s threaded with laugh-out-loud humor and danger, but ultimately it’s a call for empathy and overcoming adversarial attitudes, which feels exactly right in these divided times." -- Booklist, STARRED REVIEW Catherynne M. Valente is an acclaimed New York Times bestselling creator of over forty works of fantasy and science fiction, including the Fairyland novels and The Glass Town Game . She has been nominated for the Nebula and World Fantasy awards, and has won the Otherwise (formerly Tiptree), Hugo, and Andre Norton award. She lives on a small island off the coast of Maine with her partner, young son, and a shockingly large cat with most excellent tufts. Chapter One: The Wild and the Mild Chapter One THE WILD AND THE MILD Osmo Unknown had always lived in Littlebridge, and nothing interesting had ever happened to him there. He was born, neither rich nor poor, in a little white four-room cottage on the north side of the Catch-a-Crown River, almost at the furthest edge of town. He thought he would most likely die an old man with a white beard, neither rich nor poor, in a little white four-room cottage on the north side of the Catch-a-Crown River. He was quite, quite wrong about that. Osmo Unknown was not precisely the sort of person you think of when someone says the word hero . He wasn’t impressively big or strong. He didn’t have a famous sword or a glorious destiny foretold through the ages. He had thick curly black hair and friendly hazel eyes, the color of old pages and old leaves. He was a bit short and thin for his age, with long clever fingers. The boys in school thought him strange and the girls didn’t think about him at all. On the other hand, Littlebridge was precisely the kind of place you think of when someone says the word village . The bell tower in the center of town. The painted houses with straw-and-clover roofs and crisscrossed windows. The schoolhouse and the green-and-brown river full of trout and eels and the tavern with golden, welcoming light in the windows even at eight in the morning. The bits of roof gargoyle and marble rose leaves from an age when folk took a bit more care with architecture. All nestled in a pretty valley with good, steady rain and strong, reliable sun, sandwiched between the steep blue mountains on one side and a deep, thorny forest on the other. And of course, there was no shortage of mysterious legends no one believed in anymore and stern rules everyone broke when they were young and insisted on when they got old. What sorts of rules? Oh, just the usual kind. Nothing out of the ordinary. Don’t go out alone after sundown and never eat anything that talks and stay out of the woods no matter what, this means you . In fact, there was only one single, solitary strange and unusual thing in the whole town. Only one thing you wouldn’t find in an