by Kirra Herter
MG Contemporary Fantasy
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Query
FELICITY TERN BECOMES THE FALL is a 60,000-word middle-grade contemporary fantasy for young readers who are fans of Katherine Arden’s Small Spaces and Johnathan Auxier’s The Night Gardener.
Twelve-year-old Felicity Tern was born with the powers of fall—sprouting pumpkins from the palm of her hand, bringing scarecrows to life, and chatting with ghosts. She loves all of her powers except for one: the North Wind, an uncontrollable storm that has caused her nothing but trouble at school and at home. Luckily for Felicity, just as the gale grows from a nuisance into a danger, the McElroy School for Seasons comes calling.
Felicity soon learns that the boundaries between seasons are breaking—tornadoes are raging, droughts are destroying habitats, hurricanes are wreaking endless havoc—and Ibrik Abaddon, the world’s most famous and successful weatherman, is the man behind it all. Once he learns of the North Wind hiding within Felicity, he resolves to kidnap her and make use of her power, just as he has several other seasonally-gifted children. Felicity and her new classmates—one spring, one summer, and one winter—may not like each other, but they must work together to unravel Abaddon’s plans before ecological disaster strikes.
The worst of her new classmates is the summer boy, Felicity’s former next-door neighbor and current nemesis. She learned long ago that he can’t be trusted, but as the air grows colder and an attack on the school leaves the team without mentors, she will have to rediscover that trust. If the students at McElroy’s School for Seasons can’t bring the seasons back together themselves, Ibrik Abaddon’s greed will lead to the end of humanity on Planet Earth.
I have been a fourth-grade teacher for seven years. I wanted to write a story that was as upbeat and goofy as my own students without sacrificing the seriousness of the subject matter. I participate in a local writers’ group and read almost as many books as I teach.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
First Five Pages
Felicity peered out her bay window at the wreckage next door. Branches and leaves cluttered the otherwise perfectly manicured lawn, and her mother’s tree lay atop three huge, crushed columns from the Blakes’ home next door. She supposed the Blakes could afford a little bit of damage every now and then, but the Terns were a different story. Dad worked at the Eskwood City Library, where he shelved books and hosted craft workshops. Not the most lucrative of businesses.
“How many times have I told you to cut this thing down, Peter?” Henry Blake shouted over the wind, his crisp blue suit an awkward contrast to Dad’s faded sweatshirt and brown corduroy pants.
“It was regulation height,” Dad said, and it was. Felicity knew that for a fact. Every year on Mom’s birthday, Dad and Felicity would walk down to the city magistrate to check, and every year the tree was approved.
Felicity also knew that the tree crashing into the Blake's house had nothing to do with height. She knew it was her fault, but she wasn’t about to share that with her neighbors. Or even her father.
“It had to have been the nightmares,” Felicity said, wagging her finger at her black cat Macbeth. Unconcerned, the cat meandered away from the window back to her bed, which was smattered with orange tutus and weather-related graphic t-shirts.
The nightmares had started exactly one year ago on her eleventh birthday and had not ceased. Swirling masses of hot air collided with cold. They whirled and whirled and whirled until they picked up enough speed to sweep away everything in sight. Until now, the only damage it had caused was some shattered glass from picture frames flung from the wall, but whatever was inside her soul had been growing stronger. No matter how hard she tried to shove it back down, it refused.
Felicity collapsed onto a pile of clothing and wrapped herself in a blanket covered in images of raccoons snuggling in sweaters. Her eyes drifted toward the bulletin board above her desk and glanced at a well-worn, pumpkin-shaped sticky note. On it were frantic, faded scribbles in her mother’s handwriting: Find the fall in every moment.
Normally, that wasn’t difficult, but the fall had just sent the most colorful maple tree in southwestern Pennsylvania tumbling to its death. She could still hear the tree’s whimpers over the choir of cats congregating in the yard.
Felicity sighed and wished her mother would have left more practical advice. Like how to select the perfect outfit for the first day of the season, or where to direct the mobs of inky colored stray cats that kept flocking to her. Dad had grown tired of receiving noise complaints from the landlord.
To distract herself, Felicity opened her laptop and watched the daily forecast. “Good morning, early risers. It’s a beautiful morning for most of the country today, but the eastern United States woke up to the carnage left behind by a swath of tornadoes ripping through Pennsylvania in the late hours,” the weatherman said. His hand swept across a digital map showing various wind speeds in purple, blue, and red splotches. In unison the wind within Felicity bulged up. She gulped. It was her fault.
“That’s abnormal for us, isn’t it?” Dad asked. “I’ve never thought of Pennsylvania as tornado country.” He had entered her room without a knock and sat himself on the corner of her bed.
“I guess.” Felicity grabbed her stuffed corn-on-the cob and crawled under a pile of maroon sweatshirts and mustard turtlenecks. A hiccup of air escaped from her throat as Mom’s sticky note fell, unnoticed, and fluttered out the window.
“So?” she asked.
“So, what?” Dad never liked tough conversations.
“Mom’s tree.”
“Yes, it’s… Perhaps, it’s time for a new tree,” Dad said.
Felicity would rather have an empty hole. “Perhaps it is,” she said. Again the blustery thing billowed up, blowing the bedroom door shut with a swift slam. She wished her father would yell, scream, send a frying pan flying at the wall. But Peter Tern handled pain differently.
“I bought you something,” Dad said. “In honor of this momentous occasion.”
“You bought me something for the destruction of Mom’s tree?” Felicity peeked up from within her cloth cave to see a leather-bound book on her father’s lap. Emerging like a swamp monster, she snatched it up into her hands. Her fingers traced the gold etching of the words The Care and Keeping of Clouds. The binding—a clear, pastel blue—was clean and free from distortions.
“Not just for Mom’s tree. The weather panel, your birthday. I suppose it could be all three.” Dad rubbed his unshaven chin with his fingers.
Felicity’s hands flipped through the pages. “It’s too much.” But it was perfect. Even if it cost too much money. Even if she didn’t deserve it.
“I got a special deal on it, a librarian’s discount.” Dad pushed up his glasses.
Felicity wondered if he might know what to do with the inconvenient wind. After all, he had fixed everything the time Felicity attended a field trip at the local candy factory, and the tour guide gave the whole class a bag of Great White Gummy Sharks. Felicity couldn’t stop copying them in her palms, but Dad ate every single one.
He also had handled the Gobble Gobble Grocery Store Incident of her fourth-grade year well, sending back every turkey that had stampeded through the Eskwood City Grocery to the flat farmlands they had flown in from.
There was no reason to believe Dad couldn’t handle this new problem, too, no matter how bothersome.
“Dad, I…” Felicity started. It was now or never. Never seemed preferable, but if Dad could save up enough money to buy her Dr. Gerrit Koppen’s new book, she could tell him about the new windy parasite making its home inside her body.
“Do you see that?” Dad interrupted, rushing to the window.
“What?” Felicity said. She followed him, The Care and Keeping of Clouds tucked close to her chest. She half expected to see a towering green funnel extending from the sky, but all she found was a limousine the color of obsidian parked in front of her house.
Felicity’s heart skipped a beat as the limo door opened. An imposing stranger in a cloak of luxurious deep red velvet swerved between the meowing felines stationed along the stone path leading to the Tern’s front door. The stranger’s face hid beneath a hood that even in the bright morning managed to envelop him in a thousand shadows.
“Is that the insurance agent?” Felicity asked.
“He’s ominous enough to be,” Dad said.
They both fumbled down the stairs. Felicity was glad for a distraction, especially one that had stepped right out of an Edgar Allen Poe story. Something faintly spooky might cheer her up a bit. It was her birthday, after all.
Dad unlatched and unlocked the clunky wooden door, but it was the man who spoke first. “Good morning.” His voice was as deep as a grave itself, gravelly like the rocks scattered throughout the soil. He pulled down his hood, and his full head of silver hair sparkled in the sunlight. His irises were almost transparent, a mixture of gray and blue so light it was hard to see any color at all. His skin was as thin and white as rice paper.
Dad moved forward, his chest puffed out like a bird making itself look larger. “I assure you, the tree was the right height and—”
The red-cloaked man dragged his eyes up and down Felicity’s father. “Peter Tern, I presume?” He grabbed Dad’s hand and clasped it between both his palms, one of which was not a palm at all, only the carpals and metacarpals of a skeleton.
“Do you by chance have any memory of…” he paused and produced a sheet of paper from which he read. “…of a triple pumpkin pastry, made by Dolores P. Schnieder of Butter Brickle Lane twelve Octobers ago?”
Dad placed his hands on his hips and huffed. Twelve Octobers? She was twelve and had been born in October. Felicity arched her eyebrow.
“I do. We do,” Felicity said, a calm Macbeth cuddled in her arms.
“You must be Felicity.” The man slipped past Mr. Tern, his movement like a leaf caught upon the autumn breeze. “I am Dr. Smierch, Dean of all Fall Fellows at the McElroy School for Seasons. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”