Ballad & Dagger

Sixteen-year-old Mateo Matisse plays piano and studies to be a doctor, living quietly in Little Madrigal, the Brooklyn neighborhood that took in the survivors of San Madrigal after their island sank into the sea. Chela Hidalgo has always kept her distance from him. When violence erupts at a neighborhood celebration, the two of them discover that they carry the spirits of two of San Madrigal's founding legends: the pirate Okok and the healer Galanika.

What follows is a story about a community built from Caribbean, Jewish, and West African roots, about the secrets its elders have kept, and about what two teenagers do when the myths they grew up on turn out to be true and unfinished.

Ballad & Dagger is the first book in Daniel Jose Older's Outlaw Saints series, an urban fantasy rooted in diaspora, music, and the question of whether a lost home should be raised again.