W
ritten in Starlight begins not long after the chaotic events of
Woven in Moonlight, the first book in Isabel Ibañez’s young-adult fantasy duology. Ximena, the fake condesa, and Princess Tamaya remain in the capital as Catalina, the actual condesa, is banished to the jungle where she is expected to die. All Catalina has ever wanted is to take back the throne and rule of Inkasisa as her ancestors did. Now, her last chance is to forge an alliance with the notoriously fierce Illari who live deep in the Yanu Jungle and don’t take kindly to outsiders. As fate would have it, Catalina bumps into Manuel, the presumed lost son of an Illustrian general who has been trapped in the jungle for months. They head for Paititi, the mythical city of the Illari, with the goal of returning to the capital with an army at her back and magic at her fingertips. There in the hidden mountain city, Catalina finds something else instead: herself.
We all know the story of Peter Pan. It’s the kind of cultural phenomena that seeps into our bones at the earliest of ages. We learned it from a movie, someone read it to us, or we caught a glimpse of Tinker Bell on a backpack or T-shirt and had to know more. Because of this regular immersion in Neverland since childhood, when we approach a novel based on
Peter Pan we think we know what to expect. And when we discover, as we do in Aiden Thomas’s
Lost in the Never Woods, that the main character is named Wendy Darling and that she tells stories about a boy named Peter, well, we think we know exactly what is going to happen. Indeed, through each chapter of
Content warning: This title deals graphically with the emotional and psychological fallout from sexual assault.
As Anna-Marie McLemore’s
The Mirror Season opens, Graciela Cristales (“Ciela”) is dropping off a boy she does not know at the emergency room in her hometown of Astoria OR. It quickly becomes clear that the two of them were at a party together and she knows he was drugged, to the point of semi-consciousness. She also knows something terrible was done to him – she saw something terrible done to him – and something terrible was done to her as well. Hours earlier, both of them were victims of sexual assault. Ciela gets the boy safely inside the hospital and then leaves, unable to face him, barely able to face herself. In the parking lot she encounters a beautiful flower, its petals mysteriously transformed into shards of broken mirror glass. That is the first moment that “The Snow Queen” makes its mark on the narrative, and author Anna-Marie McLemore cements
In
Legendborn, an epic blend of Arthurian legend and Southern Black magical tradition, author Tracy Deonn incorporates the endless allure of collegiate secret societies with a lighter version of Hunger Games-esque battles (not to the death), and a cast of demons to give readers a big adventure that doesn’t stop until the final pages. (And even then it’s not an ending but a set-up for the sequel.) It’s about leaving home for the first time, trying to care about college, screwing up, uncovering a major mystery about your past, and… seeing demons while discovering that the cool kids on campus are descendants of the original Round Table. The truly unexpected hook in
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