The Lost Sisters (The Folk of the Air, #1.5)

by Holly Black

Let’s start with a love story. Or maybe it’s another horror story. It seems like the difference is mostly in where the ending comes.

All stories are lessons.

Fairy tales have a moral: Stay on the path. Don’t trust wolves. Don’t steal things, not even things you think no normal person would care about. Share your food but don’t trust people who want to share their food with you; don’t eat their shiny red apples, nor their candy houses, nor any of it. Be nice, always nice, and polite to everyone: kings and beggars, witches and wounded bears. Don’t break a promise. Be bold, be bold, but not too bold. It’s important that we learn the lessons our mother didn’t.

He’s handsome, but that makes his horribleness worse, somehow. As though he’s taken something nice and made it awful. Being the single focus of his attention made me feel like a bug that a child was going to burn with a magnifying glass.

“There it is. That temper you try to hide. You know what fascinates me about you? You’re a hungry person sitting in front of a banquet, refusing to eat.”

“Sometimes it’s easier to be mad at the people close to us,” Vivi said, “than to be mad at the people who deserve it.”