Sixteen-year-old Canny is a math prodigy and the daughter of Sisema Mochrie, a Ma'eu woman and New Zealand national hero who saved two downed airmen during World War II by paddling them in an outrigger 500 miles, avoiding capture by occupying Japanese forces. When her mother and stepfather take a trip to the Shackle Islands, where her mother grew up, Canny must accompany her older half-brother Sholto and his girlfriend Susan to a coal-mining town on the peninsula, where they are conducting oral history interviews. Canny, who has always been able to sense when magic is present, feels it as soon as they arrive. There's a house she can see that Sholto and Susan cannot. In it she finds Ghislain Zarene. He looks like a seventeen-year-old boy but in reality is a man who's been held captive and un-aging by his family's magic for years. Slowly the story behind current events in the valley and an unsettling history unfold. Both involve a longstanding Zarene family tragedy and Canny's relationship with her own mother. Elizabeth Knox has penned a rich, challenging historical fantasy that occupies the same alternate world as her earlier Dreamweaver duet. She weaves numerous strands into an intricate tapestry touching on multiple themes-gender, race, class, sexuality, honesty, loyalty, love. The growing sense of mystery and wonder is mesmerizing in a story that will satisfy readers eager to tackle a complex, ambitious work. (Age 14 and older)

Sixteen-year-old Canny Mochrie's parents go away on a vacation, so they send her off on a trip of her own with her step-brother Sholto and his opinionated girlfriend Susan, who are interviewing the survivors of a strange coal mine disaster and researching local folklore in 1959 Southland, New Zealand. Canny is left to herself to wander in a mysterious and enchanting nearby valley, occupied almost entirely by children who all have the last name Zarene and can perform a special type of magic that tells things how to be stronger and better than they already are. With the help of a seventeen-year-old boy who is held hostage in a hidden away house by a spell that is now more powerful than the people who first placed it, Canny figures out why she, too, can use this special magic that only Zarenes should know, and where she really came from. Printz Honor author Elizabeth Knox has created another stunning world of intrigue in Mortal Fire.