About the Book
Title: Raising Sleeping Stones
Author: P.H.T. Bennett
Genre: MG Fantasy
Like every kid in Solasenda, 11-year-old Kiva Stone
has been far too busy training for one of the five town guilds to think about something
as useless as dreaming. But when she and her sister DeeDee uncover a mysterious
plot to get rid of them, their only hope lies with a shadowy group of people
who get unimaginable powers from their dreams. As the girls escape with them up
the river, they start learning secret dreaming techniques that have been
forbidden for centuries. But how can they learn enough to stand against the
enemies chasing them? The answer lies in the shattered history of Orora Crona,
the lost Valley of Dreams, and whoever can piece it together first will rule
for centuries to come.
Author Bio
P.H.T.
Bennet began exploring his dreams when he was a child and has never bothered to
stop. He had the good luck to have two daughters, Juliette and Paola, who not
only served as the inspirations for DeeDee and Kiva, the main characters of
Raising Sleeping Stones, but also helped him turn their family dreamwork
sessions into this book. His lucky streak grew when he married his lovely wife,
Mim,who tolerates his turning on a light in the middle of the night to write
down ever-crazier dreams and talking about them in the morning as long as he
lets her sleep in, first. His favorite dreams involve flying, visiting the
dead, and replaying nightmares
until they reveal their secrets.
Pratt’s latest projects are
editing Book Two of the Orora Crona Chronicles and planning a virtual summer
dreaming camp with other dream authors.
Links
Website: http://www.raisingstones.com/
Facebook: http://bit.ly/RSSfacebook
Twitter: @phtbennet
Book Excerpt
Kiva looked down from her position on a tree
branch high above the forest floor and
frowned. She took a slow, deep breath while
calculating the distance between the maple she
was in and the branch she’d need on the elm
tree, then started putting together all the training steps she’d been taking.
Bending her knees and rolling forward on her
feet, she curled her left hand behind her
and went into a crouch. She instinctively
twitched her hand away just before it touched her
back, a move that would trigger another of
Sakral’s withering criticisms that had been making Kiva’s errors painfully
memorable.
While letting her breath out slowly, she
whipped her left arm forward, snapping her
wrist up to release the coiled swingvine
Sakral had lent her. Pointing at her swing branch, she waited as the end of the
vine landed and curled around it, then jerked back with her fist to set its
hooks into the branch.
Feeling the connection was solid, Kiva took a
quick, deep breath and jumped.
Though she’d done it dozens of times in the
past four nights of training and traveling
upriver with Sakral, the moment of jumping off
a branch was still terrifying. The feeling of
falling always threatened to make her panic
and lose focus. Before it could, though, the
tightening of the swingvine around her glove
snapped her body into the series of practiced
moves Sakral had taught her to turn falling
into flying, fear into freedom. Extending both arms over her head, Kiva swung
her legs back and put her head down until she passed under her swing branch
midway into the arc of her flight, then smoothly lifted her head and brought
her legs down.
As she passed the first level of branches on
the other side, she pulled down on the vine,
tilted her head back, and swung her legs
forward in one fluid movement. The rush of swinging up—even more intense now
than it had been that first time with Raymonde—made the past few days of
dropping through the air, crashing into trunks, and getting tangled up in her swingvine
all worth it because, at these moments, she felt more powerful, energized, and
alive than she ever had. She was so thrilled by the sensation that she almost
didn’t see the small branch in her way before it was too late.
In a flash, she tightened her left arm’s hold
on the vine as she brought her right arm
angled up in front to deflect the branch away
from her face and swung her legs to the left to
keep from being spun to the side. Even though
the branch was thin, it slashed like a whip, but the bark shields Sakral had
tied on her forearms took most of the impact. In less than a second, Kiva had
swung her legs back to the middle and up to complete her arc. She was delighted
to find she was still heading straight for a good landing branch on her target
tree.
Then came the most difficult move of all. Just
before reaching the top of her arc, she
pulled the vine forward, swung her legs down,
bent her knees, and landed softly on the near
side of her landing branch, letting the
momentum roll her forward exactly to the middle. She
felt her feet naturally flex to fit the curve
of the branch and stabilize her as Sakral had been
repeatedly telling her to do. A perfect
landing!
And now, for the finishing touch, she said to
herself. Without turning around or even
looking back, she brought her left arm down,
waited until she felt the vine go slack, then
twitched the vine, and waited again. She
counted to six—the amount of time she had learned the living vine needed to
detach its hooks from the pivot branch and coil itself back up—then curled her
wrist forward, opened her fingers, and caught it neatly in the palm of her
gloved hand.
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