Osmo Unknown and the Eightpenny Woods

Catherynne M. Valente

• Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN:
  9781481477017
• Print ISBN:
  9781481477000

"I loved every speck of it." —Kelly Barnhill, Newbery Medal–winning author of The Girl Who Drank the Moon From New York Tim e s bestselling author Catherynne M. Valente comes an inventive middle grade fantasy that follows a boy journeying away from the only home he's ever known and into the magical realm of the dead to fulfill a bargain for his people. Osmo Unknown hungers for the world beyond his small town. With the life that Littlebridge society has planned for him, the only taste Osmo will ever get are his visits to the edge of the Fourpenny Woods where his mother hunts. Until the unthinkable happens: his mother accidentally kills a Quidnunk, a fearsome and intelligent creature that lives deep in the forest.None of this should have anything to do with poor Osmo, except that a strange treaty was once formed between the Quidnunx and the people of Littlebridge to ensure that neither group would harm the other. Now that a Quidnunk is dead, as the firstborn child of the hunter who killed her, Osmo must embark on a quest to find the Eightpenny Woods—the mysterious kingdom where all wild forest creatures go when they die—and make amends.Accompanied by a very rude half-badger, half-wombat named Bonk and an antisocial pangolin girl called Never, it will take all of Osmo's bravery and cleverness to survive the magic of the Eightpenny Woods to save his town…and make it out alive.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• First Things First
• Second Things Second
• Chapter One: The Wild and the Mild
• Chapter Two: A Lot of Rubbish
• Chapter Three: A Black-Ribbon Boy
• Chapter Four: Girls and Knights and Needles
• Chapter Five: An Awful Word, an Impossible House
• Chapter Six: Subclause Four A
• Chapter Seven: The Male of the Species
• Chapter Eight: Agatha Underground
• Chapter Nine: This Chapter Is Silver
• Chapter Ten: Nevermore
• Chapter Eleven: The Octoberpole
• Chapter Twelve: The Land of What Does It Matter Now
• Chapter Thirteen: Down the Road to the River After
• Chapter Fourteen: Were You Kind?
• Chapter Fifteen: On Proserpina and the Dark
• Chapter Sixteen: New Puppy Day
• Chapter Seventeen: Widows’ Weeds
• Chapter Eighteen: Button, Button
• Chapter Nineteen: At the Bottom of the Unfinished Ocean
• Chapter Twenty: The Hinderlands
• Chapter Twenty-One: Heads, Bellies, and Hearts
• Chapter Twenty-Two: A Beastly Fight
• Chapter Twenty-Three: The Party Never Stops
• Chapter Twenty-Four: The Whispering Place
• Chapter Twenty-Five: The Blue Whale’s Gambit
• Chapter Twenty-Six: Two Stories
• The Explosion at the End of This Book
• A Brief and Late Intermission
• Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Wildest Thing There Is
• Chapter Twenty-Eight: A Fish Goes Home
• Last Things Last
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright