A windborne legend whirls into a storm-kissed modern YA romantasy about curses, city skies, and the boy who reads the weather in your pulse.
Seventeen-year-old Zara Velasco has already been claimed by the wind three times. The fifth claiming will lift her from the earth forever. That is the tally written into the gustmarks spiraling her ribs, a family curse that demands she keep everyone at arm's length, her secrets hidden and her feet planted. When her mother dies without warning and the wind takes its fourth due, Zara refuses to let the last one come for her.
A wooden box of letters stamped Kadıköy and a brass whirligig compass send her to Istanbul, where the Bosphorus breathes and the alleys of Karaköy twist like air currents. There she meets Deniz Karaca, a street magician and weather-seer who can hear barometric pressure like music. With Deniz's help, Zara follows traces of her mother's past through the Galata Mevlevihanesi archives, a jeweler in the Grand Bazaar, and the lighthouse at Maiden's Tower, hunting the original script of the Cyclone Codex that first bound her line.
But closeness stirs the gale inside her, and every laugh and lingering look threatens to tip her into the sky. Above them, the Four Who Turn—Sirocco, Mistral, Shamal, and Zephyra—have their own designs for the girl who might unwrite their contract. Plans are shifting, and they don't like their winds being stolen.
Riding the Whirlwinds is a dazzling, funny, and aching YA romantasy about grief, grit, and choosing the hand that reaches for you even when the air is thin.
