The alebrijos come to life and swim through the air to find them. Lore has dyslexia, and that has added to the bullying she's encountered.īut after Lore shows up in town, the world under the lake starts coming to them. It's summer, but when she encounters Bastián, they both remember. Now they are sixteen, and after a disaster at school, Lore's family has moved to the town by the lake. She ran past Bastián, and much to both of their surprise, the world under the lake opened up for Lore as well, and she was able to hide there until the bully had stopped looking for her. One day when they were nine years old, Lore was visiting the lake on a field trip and ran from a bully. Well, almost no one else knows about the world under the lake. Then he releases the alebrijo into the world under the lake, the one no one else knows about, and it gets out of his mind. When something is bothering Bastián so much he can't stop thinking about it, he makes an alebrijo and puts that energy into it. As part of that management, his brother taught him to make alebrijos, fantastical creatures made of wire and papier-mâché. Bastián has ADHD and has learned to manage his thought processes so he can function. Both have brown skin, and both have encountered discrimination and bullying.īoth kids have also dealt with brains that don't work like other people's. Bastián is a transgender boy and Lore is transgender nonbinary. They also often include wonderfully nuanced representation of transgender characters. I didn't think of myself as a fan of magical realism until I started loving her books.

In my years of reading speculative fiction for the Cybils, I've become a fan of Anna-Marie McLemore. Review written October 25, 2022, from a library eaudiobook. 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.Recorded Books, 2022. If Bastián and Lore don’t want it bringing their secrets to the surface with it, they have to stop it, and to do that, they have to work together. The world under the lake drifts above the surface. Then the lines between air and water begin to blur. Lore’s only seen the world under the lake once, but that one encounter changed their life and their fate. Bastián grew up both above the lake and in the otherworldly space beneath it.

But Bastián Silvano and Lore Garcia are the only ones who’ve been there. In this young adult novel by award-winning author Anna-Marie McLemore, two non-binary teens are pulled into a magical world under a lake-but can they keep their worlds above water intact?Įveryone who lives near the lake knows the stories about the world underneath it, an ethereal landscape rumored to be half-air, half-water.

Lakelore book