Eleven-year-old Alejandro can’t catch a break. Placed with demanding foster parents and stuck in yet another new school, he’s lucky if he can stay out of trouble long enough to hear his friends’ silly ghost stories at recess.
Not that his friends are any help. When the janitor confiscates their electronics, they convince Alejandro to sneak to the basement office to get their belongings. But instead of their things, he discovers something else: a glowing coin hidden under an old shelf, long forgotten.
With the help of his pet hedgehog, Alejandro retrieves the coin, and when he tries to clean it, he does more than remove dirt—he releases the spirit of an old man, one with a magical gift that could solve all of Alejandro’s problems.
Maybe the ghost stories weren’t so silly after all.
I’m thrilled to introduce my first middle-grade novel, Alejandro’s Coin, to the world. It will be released on April 2nd, and the ebook is available for pre-order now!
Alejandro’s story is a retelling of Aladdin set in a modern-day, high-poverty elementary school. Feedback from advance review copy readers, both kids and adults, has been overwhelmingly positive. I’ll be posting more about the story and how it came to be in the coming weeks. For now, I hope all will love the story as much as I do, and I leave you with some hedgehog merch I made to accompany the book at events.
Allison Maruska 