Lakelore

by Anna-Marie McLemore

Genres: YA Contemporary

Synopsis

Everyone who lives near the lake knows the stories about the world underneath it, an ethereal landscape rumored to be half water, half air. But Bastián Silvano and Lore Garcia are the only ones who’ve been there. Bastián grew up both above
the lake and in the otherworldly space beneath it. Lore’s seen the world under the lake only once, but that one encounter changed their life and their fate.
Then the lines between air and water begin to blur. The world under the lake begins to spill into the world above. If Bastián and Lore don’t want it bringing their secrets to the surface, they have to stop it—and to do that, they need to work
together. There’s just one problem: Bastián and Lore haven’t spoken in seven years, and working together means trusting each other with the very things they’re trying to hide.

Release date: March 8, 2022

Publisher: Feiwel & Friends

Print pages: 304

Sample

BASTIÁN



No one believed it when I said I’d seen the world under the lake. But that could have been for a lot of reasons. The first time I found it I was seven, and what adults called daydreamy, lost in thought, and other words that suggested my imagination might create a whole world out of the lakelore I’d heard growing up.

If I had to guess why no one believed it—other than how I never could find it when I tried to show anyone—it was probably because no one believed it existed anymore. People around here used to. It was once a given that there was a whole world under the lake, that it was half water, half air, that it was as strange and luminous as being inside a sea-foam bubble.

All that was just part of the shared understanding of the lake here, the lakelore. Like fishermen telling how far out storms were by the tint to the sky, or how las viejas measured the seiches so carefully they could predict them like tides.

But as far as I could tell, anyone who took the world under the lake as fact was long gone. The old men gauging the clouds, the old women reading the rise and fall of the water, they were probably the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of anyone who’d believed in the world under the lake.

That part of the lakelore had fallen away, yielding to talk of where opposing winds were likely to make whirlpools or sightings of perch as big as horses. The world under the lake sounded so impossible that no one even made up stories or bragged about it the way they would about seeing ghosts along the western shoreline, or spotting giant prehistoric fish that looked like a cross between dolphins and lizards.

There was no one else here who’d seen the world under the lake, or who even pretended they had.

Then I met Lore.

Not that I knew their name yet.

Not that they did either.


Copyright © 2022 by Anna-Marie McLemore