Vial of tears
(Book)

When Samira receives a strange vase with some ancient coins, she and her sister Rima are pulled into Baalbek, a Phoenician underworld where they are caught up in a struggle between deities, shapeshifters, and ghouls--and Eshmun, who wants his obol, his burial coin, back.

Samira and Rima live with their maddeningly unreliable mother in a rundown trailer in Michigan. Dad's dead, money's tight, and Mom disappears for days at a time. When Sam's grandfather wills her the family valuables-- a cache of Lebanese antiquities-- she's desperate enough to try pawning them before Mom can. She discovers that one is cursed, forbidden: the burial coin of a forgotten god. Disturbing it condemns them to the Phoenician underworld, a place of wicked cities, burning cedar forests, poisoned feasts of milk and lemons, and an endless, windless ocean. To get home, Sam will have to outwit beautiful shapeshifters, pose as a royal bride, sail the darkest sea-- and maybe kill the god of death himself. -- adapted from jacket