Below the Surface

Jackson Hollow has been carrying a word around since sixth grade.

The word is almost.

Almost happy. Almost honest. Almost the person everyone assumes he is when they look at him from the outside. Jackson is fifteen, from Eden Prairie, Minnesota, with a loving family and a best friend who sees more than he lets her and a new classmate named Ethan who makes his ears warm in a way he is categorically not thinking about. He is good at school and good at being quiet and exceptionally good at keeping himself at the outside of his own life, where nothing can get close enough to matter too much.

Then he finds the door.

Hidden in a corridor of the Mall of America that no one else can see, carved with symbols that match the unidentifiable markings on his father's antique maps, the door opens onto the Underlandia - an ancient world that exists directly beneath Minnesota, untouched by time, lit by a permanent aurora and two moons, alive in ways the surface world has forgotten how to be.

In the Underlandia, Jackson meets Finn - quick, reckless, and disarmingly honest - whose people have been watching the Gateway for decades, waiting for someone who could open it. He meets Nima, Finn's grandmother and the keeper of an ancient prophecy that carries the Hollow name. And he begins to understand what has been slowly draining the world below: Vaedryn, the Hollow Queen, a once-great guardian who chose emptiness over surviving the pain of love, and whose hollowness has been spreading ever since.

The problem is that Jackson understands her. More than he wants to.

Because Vaedryn is what happens when someone chooses never to be known. And Jackson has been making a smaller version of that same choice his entire life.

Below the Surface is a story about a hidden world and a hidden self - about the courage it takes to open doors, both literal and otherwise. It is about first love in two worlds, about the families we are born into and the ones we find, about what it means to be hollow and what it means to let the water in.