Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky
core novel 2019 Tristan Strong
Record
| First published | 2019 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.16 (10,971 ratings, collected 2026-09-04) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781368039932 |
| Internal chronology | 1 |
Synopsis
Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky opens with Tristan Strong, a seventh-grader from Chicago still grieving the death of his best friend Eddie in a bus accident, sent to spend the summer with his grandparents on their rural Alabama farm. Restless and unable to shake his grief, Tristan chases a strange, doll-like creature that has stolen Eddie's journal, a notebook filled with West African and African American folktales the two boys had collected together, into the nearby woods. There he accidentally punches a mysterious Bottle Tree, tearing open a portal into Alke, a parallel world where the gods, heroes, and monsters from that journal's stories are real. Pulled into Alke and pursued by living, chain-like creatures called Fetterlings, Tristan must navigate this unfamiliar realm's dangers while searching for a way to set right the rift he has caused.
Where it sits
- Universe: Tristan Strong
- Series: Tristan Strong core; position 1 of 3 in the series' recorded order
- Author: Kwame Mbalia
Awards (verified)
- Coretta Scott King Author Award (Author Award), 2020: won
Notes
- From the series record (Tristan Strong): Complete trilogy; all Core Canon.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings, but they resolve to the exact same sequence for this book, so one combined line is shown instead of two identical ones.
- Reading order, within the series Tristan Strong: position 1 of 3: next Tristan Strong Destroys the World (2020)
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwame_Mbalia
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_Strong_Punches_a_Hole_in_the_Sky
← Tristan Strong dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.