The Hinterland — a fairytale world filled with magic, violence, and wickedly beautiful promises. In this collection of twelve dark fairytales, author Melissa Albert brings to life the stories that make up the very backbone of her debut novel, The Hazel Wood. Within these pages, girls grown from apple blossoms, women in bearskins, and grooms with the eyes of lions perform a precarious dance, toying with the fibers of life.
The School for Good and Evil is the first book in a series of the same name by Soman Chainani. This is a middle-grade fantasy novel that follows two girls in their early teens as they are taken from their hometown and thrust into a school to learn to become either good or evil. Although this is a middle-grade book, it has some more mature themes and insinuating moments in the dialogue.
How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories is a companion book to Holly Black’s Folk of the Air series, this time following High King Cardan, one of the series’ more compelling characters.
The second book in the Lunar Chronicles, Scarlet, is a take on the well known tale of Little Red Riding Hood. The main character and namesake is Scarlet, a farm girl living on the outskirts of a small French town. Scarlet’s spunkiness and courageous attitude makes her an almost shockingly dynamic character compared to Cinder from the first book.
Prince Sebastian has a secret, one no one can ever find out. At night, he wears beautiful dresses and takes Paris by storm as a fashion icon named Lady Crystallia. Only two people know his dangerous secret, and one of them is his best friend, Frances, his dressmaker. But she dreams of greatness as a fashion designer, but as long as she remains a secret, she will never be able to gain recognition for her work. But how long can she put her dreams on hold to protect her friend?
I'm not a fan of gruesome, graphic, gory horror; however, I'm a big fan of stories that are dark. Atmospheric. Disquieting. Plumbing the depths of the human psyche. Some of those stories are creepy dark. Some of them are deliciously dark. The Hazel Wood is gritty dark.
Wealthy cannibals who dine on the limbs of peculiars. A princess with a forked tongue. The story of the first ymbryne. These are a few of the stories told in the Tales of the Peculiar, a book known to hide information about the peculiar world that was introduced in the Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children series. This book invites you to read this collection of original stories and learn some of the secrets of the history of peculiars.
When a dangerous beast begins to terrorize the kingdom, fear panics the citizens. But soon a proclamation is sent out: kill the creature and win the ultimate prize: the daughter of the king’s hand in marriage. Princess Aerity understands her duty to the kingdom, but she can not bear to marry a complete stranger, until a mysterious young hunter catches her eye. She can’t deny her attraction to him, or his strange resentment against her. As they both continue to surprise each other, Paxton’s perilous secrets he has so meticulously buried begin to surface.
When Saville’s father is struck ill, she will do anything to survive, even pretending to be a boy to sew a fine coat for the king. But rumors are spreading about an immortal duke and his army of giants marching to seize the king’s throne. Soon, two giant scouts come and terrorize the city, but she tricks them into leaving. Stories of the brave and quick-witted tailor quickly turn into tales of giant-slaying. So it is left to the courageous and clever tailor girl to stop the duke’s army and save the kingdom.
Johnston weaves a beautiful tale of sisterhood and love, while re-creating the story A Thousand and One Nights. Similar to the original story, this is a desert setting and the king has taken 300 wives, one from each village, before coming to the village of our unnamed heroine. She asks her sister’s mother to help ready her for the king. She wants to take the focus off of her sister and offer herself to the king instead, in order to save her sister. She is swept away with the king, as he has chosen her, and taken to his palace.
