Bits of string too small to save

circumspect to a fault, ten-year-old elizabethann never intends to leave the safety of no oaks' suburban police state, but when her eccentric grandmother peels around the corner in a pimped-out hot rod and shouts that the men are coming to put her in "a home," elizabethann, grandma, and their shaggy sheepdog jackson dive through a badger hole into the forested dystopia of bumblegreen, seeking a real home. in this "wildly imaginative, occasionally haunting fantasy anchored by strong, evolving female characters," (kirkus reviews) persnickety elizabethann must solve the problem of bumblegreen's deadly pandemic lest she and grandma be considered the cause of it. joining forces with a reluctant teenaged queen and an ancient, genderless sorcerer, elizabethann and grandma strive to prove themselves worthy of bumblegreen. meanwhile, jackson falls in love but struggles with a rampant disease that turns contented animals into neurotic people, in a book new york times best-selling author john berendt called "freewheeling imagination." this whimsical meditation on the concept of home introduces a new world of seduction and betrayal, illusion and intuition, black arts and purple-speckled fruits, and you, dear reader, must ask yourself: will magic avenge our heroine? will technology save her? or will elizabethann and her motley gang of malcontents be too late to repair the beautiful, mysterious, and troubled land of bumblegreen?