The highly anticipated companion book to SHIP OF SOULS~Booklist 2012 Top Ten Sci-Fi/Fantasy Youth Title ~Finalist, 2013 Phillis Wheatley Book Award
“Urban fantasies are nothing rare, but few mesh gritty realism with poetic mysticism so convincingly. By turns sad, joyful, frightening, funny, and inspirational, Elliott’s second novel is a marvel of tone and setting, creating a universe where angry corpses and rock-monsters are every bit as expected as dirty subways and bag ladies. Issues of war, poverty, racism, Islam, and 9/11 do not bog down the telling but instead enrich it. Different readers will take away different messages, all of them powerful—quite an accomplishment for so few pages.”
~Starred review, Booklist
THE DEEP plunges readers into a dangerous, underground world policed by members of The League, a secret group of women and men who use their intuitive abilities to detect energy surges far below the earth’s surface. In the deep, ancient sources of malevolent energy are bubbling up through the bedrock, and only members of The League know how to detect and seal the leaks that allow evil to enter the world.
Nyla Evans knows nothing about the war being waged beneath the city. It has been almost a year since she moved from Ramstein Air Base in Germany to Brooklyn, and Nyla is still searching for a way to belong. It doesn’t help that she has started to hallucinate while walking the city streets, but things get even stranger when a man named Osiris approaches her and offers to introduce Nyla to others who have similar “gifts.” When Nyla refuses, her friend D is kidnapped and held in the deep until Nyla agrees to let Osiris guide her underground. There, miles beneath Brooklyn, Nyla meets Lada—the mother who abandoned her a decade ago.
Furious that Nyla is being recruited by The League, Lada tries to prevent her daughter from following in her footsteps. But Nyla feels at home in the deep and her training begins at an accelerated pace when The League discovers an earthquake will soon hit Brooklyn, releasing unprecedented levels of malevolent energy into the city.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Born in Canada, Zetta Elliott moved to Brooklyn in 1994 to pursue her PhD in American Studies at NYU. Her poetry has been published in several anthologies, and her plays have been staged in New York, Chicago, and Cleveland. Her essays have appeared in Horn Book Magazine, School Library Journal, and Hunger Mountain. Her first picture book, Bird, won the Honor Award in Lee & Low Books’ New Voices Contest; it was named Best of 2008 by Kirkus Reviews, a 2009 ALA Notable Children’s Book, and Bird won the Paterson Prize for Books for Young Readers. Elliott’s first young adult novel, A Wish After Midnight, has been called “gripping,” “a revelation…vivid, violent and impressive history.” Ship of Souls was a finalist for the Phillis Wheatley Book Award. Zetta Elliott is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Borough of Manhattan Community College and currently lives in Brooklyn.
Learn more about her at www.zettaelliott.com
Follow her blog, Fledgling: http://zettaelliott.wordpress.com/
ABOUT ROSETTA PRESS: Rosetta Press is committed to publishing books that reveal, explore, and foster a black feminist vision of the world. Learn more at http://rosettapress.wordpress.com/
THE DEEP by Zetta Elliott Rosetta Press; Publication Date: November 28, 2013 Paperback; $10.00; 158 Pages Ages: 13+ THE DEEP may be ordered online at the Rosetta Press website, Amazon.com, from major book distributors, and at your local bookstore.
