Random Book Idea

random book idea

• Esmeralda is a stunning golden-era showwoman and singer. She's all short pixie cuts gelled and glittered with glam, calf-exposing glittery dresses with a slit halfway down the skirt, and black heels. In the early 1960s, she's untouchable.

• Francisco is a top-notch criminal who steals from the rich and gives to the poor. He's quick, witty, light on his feet, and always red-handed but always wearing gloves. 

• Esmeralda’s been divorced from Francisco for twelve years, ever since her second child Ava was born….if ‘born’ is the right way to put it. They had drifted apart; Esmeralda chasing success and Francisco being drafted into the war between the so-called heroes, magical humans with a somewhat toxic humanitarian facade- and the wearh, blood-sucking villains who rule the lands underground. 

• In Francisco’s absence, Esmeralda made a deal with William, a wearh with whom she has a bit of a history, to transform her pet bird into a living child- she just wanted to feel as though she had a purpose again- especially after the authorities had sent her son Arlo off to his designated “training center,” a school designed to harness children's powers and prepare them to become successful heroes as they reach adulthood. 

• Esmeralda just didn't understand why they had to take him at two.

• Arlo is an independent, solitary, shy kid. He grows up in books and maps and rules, always following, always on the sidelines. He wants nothing more than to break free. 

• Ava is different. Esmeralda’s hidden charm, she learns at one and a half to hide in the garage whenever any car pulls up in the driveway, and to only go to the market early in the morning, before the shops officially open. She's brilliant, social, energetic, loves inventing and designing anything and everything she can get her hands on. With a creative, fast-moving mind, she loves exploring and yearns to see the world and meet everybody who lives in it. 

• Ava meets Arlo, once a summer, only for a month. September is the hottest month of the year, but the two children always run around outside from before the sun peeks above the horizon, to long after dusk when the tiny “glowbugs” create a spectacle of sunny spots through the forest behind the house.

• Those were the good days. But then one night- in December- Ava hears a knock on her window. She almost doesn't recognize the boy hanging by two paralyzed hands on her windowsill. Arlo hadn't visited the previous year, claiming he'd been too busy in a rushed, chicken-scratched letter. He had been thirteen at the time; now he was fourteen. Considering the fact that she hadn't seen him since he was twelve, her age at the present, she had been expecting a very different boy. A boy with untied shoelaces and a missing molar or two, not a tall and lanky kid with a deep voice and long bangs that hid his eyes. 

• He says he doesn't have much time. Much time before they catch him, the people who had taken his dad and forced him to kill- or worse, the people who were trying to kill his dad. He says he wants to run away, and he has been collecting for years and now possesses every map that's ever been reprinted or even sketched once. 

• With Ava hungry for adventure and Arlo desperate for escape, they formulate a plan beneath spilled candlewax and messy scribbles of possible paths on worn-out maps. And thus, their adventure ensues.