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.

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.

The two youngest were twins with cheeks as plump as peaches, ready to be eaten up.

Who wouldn’t get butterflies and blush and soften a little if they got a note like that from a cute guy?

a laugh that could charm the apples to drop from the trees.

And when I saw that note in my bag, I thought that maybe I was no longer stuck in a fairy tale, maybe I could be the hero of one.

And your obliviousness, in that moment, made it worse.

Be good, but not too good. Be pretty, but not too pretty. Be honest, but not too honest. Maybe no one got lucky. Maybe it was too hard.

Being the single focus of his attention made me feel like a bug that a child was going to burn with a magnifying glass.

“You’re awful.” He said it as though he was delighted. “And the worst part is that you believe otherwise.”

It’s terrible to be a girl trapped in a story. But you can be more than that. You can be the teller. You can shape the story.

“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.”

Jealousy wasn’t a spice to me then. It was the whole meal and I was gagging it down.