The Rabbit Never Came

Mia Weston keeps her speech on index cards and has been carrying them for three weeks. She knows exactly what she wants to say. She just hasn't walked through the door yet.
Then the scroll on her wall — an old Chinese painting of a farmer who sits beside a split tree stump, waiting for a rabbit to return — begins to change. And one night, the amber light from her desk lamp opens a door into somewhere else entirely.
The kingdom Mia and her best friend Zoe step into is frozen in gold-amber: stone roads, suspended birds, a marketplace caught mid-motion, figures stilled in the middle of ordinary moments. At its centre stands a split stump from which warmth is very slowly leaking away. Two boys have been here a long time. One has made his peace with staying. The other hasn't — but his arms are already turning to amber, and there's less and less he can do about it.
Mia doesn't have magic. She has four index cards and an argument she believes in. It turns out that might be exactly what a frozen kingdom needs.
*The Rabbit Never Came* is the first book in the Crystal Gate series — a ten-book middle grade fantasy rooted in Chinese mythology and the ancient wisdom of chengyu. It is a story about the difference between waiting and acting, and what happens when a girl who has been almost-ready for too long finally opens her mouth and speaks.
**For readers aged 9–13 who love quiet magic, real feelings, and worlds that ask something of you.**