Aza Ray is drowning in thin air.

Since she was a baby, Aza has suffered from a mysterious lung disease that makes it ever harder for her to breathe, to speak to live.

All the doctors can do is give her drugs and hope they keep her alive. So when Aza catches a glimpse of a ship in the sky, her family chalks it up to a cruel side effect of the medication. But Aza doesn't think this is a hallucination. She can hear someone on the ship calling her name.

Only her best friend, Jason, listens. Jason, who's always been there. Jason, for whom she might have more-than-friendly feelings. But before Aza can consider that thrilling idea, something goes terribly wrong. The sickness catches up with her.

Aza is lost to our world.

And found, by another.

Magonia.

Above the clouds, in a land of trading ships, Aza is not the weak and dying thing she was. In Magonia, she can breathe for the first time. Better, she has immense power. And she can use it to change the world.

As she navigates her new life, Aza discovers that war is coming. Magonia and Earth are on the cusp of a reckoning. In Aza's hands lies the whole of humanity including the boy who loves her. Where do her loyalties lie?

Maria Dahvana Headley's soaring YA debut is a fiercely intelligent, multilayered fantasy rich with symbolism and steeped in allegory. Aza's journey pulls her deep into the questions of home, of love, of self, and of just what it means to find them all.