Sabrena Swept Away

JLG Gold Standard Selection

This lush reimagining of the classic characters from The One Thousand and One Nights is for fans of The Last Mapmaker, Mañanaland, and Graciela in the Abyss. Sabrena’s family has always claimed they are descended from the legendary sailor Sinbad. But when the sea calls Sabrena to a whole new world, she’ll have to fight for her own story.

Sabrena’s destiny—her qadr—is strong. Or so her family has always said. After all, according to her dad, they are the descendants of the legendary Sinbad the sailor, who sailed the seven seas in The One Thousand and One Nights. But Sabrena has felt anything but strong lately. Mostly, she has felt worried. Worried about being the new girl in a school everyone else has attended since kindergarten, worried about Grandma’s memory failing and her stories getting more outlandish, worried about Mom deciding that Grandma can’t even live at home anymore. Worried about the strange—almost fantastical—things that keep happening whenever she’s around water.

And then, one day, the sea’s call will not be denied. It floods into her life and sweeps her away, to be fished out of an ocean both strange and oddly familiar. It only takes her a moment to realize that she’s in the stories spun by the legendary queen Scheherazade. Yet no one has ever heard of Sinbad, nothing seems to be going quite as it does in the tales as she knows them, and a frightening jinn is terrorizing the kingdom. Can Sabrena find the courage to claim her destiny before it’s too late?

• Portal Fantasy Adventure: One minute, Sabrena is a normal kid worried about starting a new school; the next, she’s swept through the water into the magical, dangerous world of Scheherazade's tales.
• Arabian Nights Retelling: Discover a world of jinn and legends, but with a twist—in this version of the story, no one has ever heard of Sabrena's famous ancestor, Sinbad the sailor.
• Grandmother and Granddaughter Story: A heartfelt exploration of family and memory, as Sabrena’s adventure in a magical land mirrors her fight to hold on to her beloved grandma’s stories back home.
• A Reluctant Hero: Sabrena has always felt more worried than strong, but to save a kingdom and find her way home, she'll have to find the courage to write her own legend.