The Loom Tree

Sharon and her daughter V are both Korean American, both raised by single mothers in the California suburbs, and both unsure where they fit. During a Finals week celebration, high schooler V feels a strange pull and crawls into a hollow tree trunk. That night, feverish, she sees glowing strands of unreadable text floating over her body and stretching between her and her mother, and they lead her to a diary Sharon left behind long ago.

With the help of a luminous quill, Sharon's memories begin to pour onto the faded pages. V watches her mother chart her past through drawings, diagrams and reclaimed histories of her short time at Alvsdahl, an exclusive East Coast college. There, legacies and heiresses trace their ancestry to Bluebeard or Cinderella and fight to control the family stories that can give them frightening abilities or reduce them to ashes. A Asian girl with no known inheritance counted for nothing, until her discoveries began to break open Alvsdahl's secrets.

Sharon's retelling is full of classroom rivalries, professors who are animals, wild nights in the woods, menacing Godmothers and powers that could shatter the world. It unfolds line by line as V tries to save her mother, and in the process learns to use Sharon's story to change both of their lives.

The Loom Tree is a magical campus novel from Angela Mi Young Hur. It follows two young women making their way toward adulthood, the rifts between parents and children, and the myths from around the world that tie people together.