This is a book about tragedies = from the world we know and also from a world that is completely new and unfamiliar to us.
There are monsters of the human kind - bullies young and old...and even those monsters we see in ourselves when we least want to admit it - and monsters we've never seen before but still somehow recognize for their selfish, hard-hearted actions.
But this is also a book about heroes - the likely and unlikely ones who save the day, save the town, save a culture and world they'll never even see.
I'll add more later (closer to its release date), but suffice it to say that the characters are as lovingly constructed as any that Mr. Schmidt has ever written.