Blog Tour: Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky by Kwame Mbalia (Excerpt + Giveaway!)

Happy Thursday and welcome to my stop on the Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky blog tour!! I’m so excited to share an excerpt of the book with you today! Read on to find out more about the book and the author, follow the rest of the tour, and enter a giveaway for a print copy of Tristan Strong!

Seventh-grader Tristan Strong feels anything but strong ever since he failed to save his best friend when they were in a bus accident together. All he has left of Eddie is the journal his friend wrote stories in. Tristan is dreading the month he’s going to spend on his grandparents’ farm in Alabama, where he’s being sent to heal from the tragedy. But on his first night there, a sticky creature shows up in his bedroom and steals Eddie’s journal. Tristan chases after it-–is that a doll?-–and a tug-of-war ensues between them underneath a Bottle Tree. In a last attempt to wrestle the journal out of the creature’s hands, Tristan punches the tree, accidentally ripping open a chasm into the MidPass, a volatile place with a burning sea, haunted bone ships, and iron monsters that are hunting the inhabitants of this world. Tristan finds himself in the middle of a battle that has left black American gods John Henry and Brer Rabbit exhausted. In order to get back home, Tristan and these new allies will need to entice the god Anansi, the Weaver, to come out of hiding and seal the hole in the sky. But bartering with the trickster Anansi always comes at a price. Can Tristan save this world before he loses more of the things he loves?

My heart skipped a beat, and I scrambled to the foot of the bed with the flashlight clutched in both of my shaking hands. I clicked it on, but nothing happened.

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” I muttered, slapping it against the palm of my hand. The switch was stuck. “Why doesn’t anything work around here?”
Click

The beam flickered on after the fifth or sixth try. “Finally!”

I swept the cone of light around, looking for anything remotely creepy, relaxing a bit each time something strange turned familiar. The fingers turned back into a coatrack. The creeping monsters turned back into the chair covered in clothes. The doll baby in the middle of the floor—-turned its head when the flashlight beam hit it.

I froze.