The Nothing Before New Year

By N S Streets

The days between Christmas and New Year's Eve have no names.

Eliot knows this now. She knows it the way she knows that her grandmother is gone, and the house is too quiet, and her parents have forgotten how to talk to each other. She knows it the way she knows that grief has a weight, and the weight is heaviest in the hours no one bothers to count.

Then someone knocks on her second-floor window.

The Keeper of Lost Hours has been collecting the time people wish away since before time had a name - every I can't wait until this is over, every clock watched, every minute endured. They've built a kingdom from those discarded moments: towers of anticipation, fountains of boredom, gardens where almost-moments bloom forever.

It's beautiful. It's also a trap.

Because the children who stay too long in the kingdom don't just visit - they fade. They become part of the walls, the rivers, the architecture of lost time. And Eliot's grandmother Margaret came here once, sixty years ago, and found something in the deepest part of the kingdom that made her strong enough to leave.

Now Eliot has until midnight on New Year's Eve to find what her grandmother found, help the children who couldn't find their way home, and learn the hardest lesson the nothing-time has to teach:

You can't escape grief. You can only learn to carry it with you.

A middle grade fantasy about loss, love, and the spaces between - for readers of The Phantom Tollbooth, When You Reach Me, and The Girl Who Drank the Moon.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GMYNLC8R
• ISBN13: 9798233852145
• Release Date: February 2026
• Publisher: N. S. Streets
• Length: 140 Pages
• Weight: 0.32 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.0" x 8.0"
• Age Range: 9 to 12 years
• Grade Range: Grades 4 to 7