i was not expecting to five-star this. i must confess - i hate the title and i hate the cover art (although i love the internal illustrations)



aren't those much better?? something about the color palette on the cover is upsetting, the covergirl looks vapid and whorish, and the title makes it seem like some teen heartthrob novel, which is it not. what it is is a sequence of three fairy tale-ish stories.

the first one is my favorite, and this one is a first-love story, so what? a frustrated girl from an old-world gypsy family living in a regular all-american town who does not fit into the high school full of beautiful "normal" people until a handsome stranger appears. yeah, the skeleton of the story is your basic fairy tale archetype, but the language with which she structures it is perfectly modern and evolved into what comes across as a very contemporary story.

kizzy and her two friends have pitch-perfect exchanges and bantering sessions that just leap right off the page. her frustration and dissatisfaction and wanting are perfect and believable and i tore through the story, wanting to get to the end and not knowing what kind of resolution the author would choose. (the perfect one, of course!)

the supernatural elements of this story; the goblins and the fruit they try to force into the mouths of maidens - i mean, it's not a subtle metaphor, but the way this woman writes just carries the reader along in a wave of perfect phrasings.

here is an overlong passage you can either read or not.

kizzy had never met her - mairenni had stayed behind in the old country - but her grandmother said she looked like her. there was a single sepia photograph of a girl in a doorway, full-lipped, with eyes that seemed to sparkle with secrets. kizzy had always been fascinated by her - truth be told, she had always identified more with that wild girl who almost sold her soul for the taste of figs than with her grandmother who kept her lips tight shut and never hungered for forbidden things. but though she stared at that photo, and even saw the shape of her own eyes and lips mirrored back at her, kizzy just couldn't see herself in that long-ago girl, ripe and thrilling and flush with a weird species of beauty the young have no vocabulary for.

kizzy was so busy wishing she was sarah ferris or jenny glass that she could scarcely see herself at all, and she was certainly blind to her own weird beauty; her heavy, spell-casting eyes, too-wide mouth, wild hair, and hips that could be wild too, if they learned how. no one else in town looked anything like her, and if she lived to womanhood, she was the one artists would want to draw, not the sarahs and jennys. she was the one who would some day know a dozen ways to wear a silk scarf, how to read the sky for rain and coax feral animals near, how to purr throaty love songs in portuguese and basque, how to lay a vampire to rest, how to light a cigar, how to light a man's imagination on fire.

if she lived to womanhood.

the second story reads the most like a typical fairy tale, mixed with biblical and classical mythologies. the story of a woman cursed with silence, told that if she ever utters a sound, her voice will destroy all who hear it.she lives her life believing in this curse until her doubt is awakened by... a handsome stranger. the tension in this story is built up so carefully, raising questions about blind faith and trust vs. hard evidence, with some field trips to the underworld. this story, too, seems darker and sexier than most fairy tales, or at least more so than ones i would expect scholastic to publish. this is an applauding tone, not a critical one.

the third story is the longest, and reads more like a fantasy short story than a fairy tale. but that might just be my unfamiliarity with these particular themes.

most fairy tales are set in a recognizable location with some fantastical elements thrown in to make them more appealing to a younger audience, but not so fantastical that the moral or lesson is not recognized as being applicable to the real world.this one is all world-building and shapeshifting and body-snatching, with very little to anchor it in a recognizable environment. it is still great, it just didn't feel as much like a traditional fairy tale as the previous two.

this story is also a little bit creepy, and it is about possession and love and protection and selfishness and how both motherhood and romantic love relate to all of the above.

i am so grateful to ariel because when we were at the suzanne collins midnight magic party and i had to pick one hardcover book to buy to get my free mug,



she talked me into this one instead of beautiful creatures which has a beautiful cover, but is a way crappier book. she helped me dodge a bullet there because friends don't let friends buy crappy books on their birthday. plus, signed!!



i am a happy girl.