“If I tell a story, will you listen to it?”
It’s the most important tale fourteen-year-old Juniper Adams will ever tell. If she tells it well enough, she may be allowed to live, but not because her kidnapper has any appreciation for storytelling. He is not the monster she must convince. The monster she must convince is a watcher—a black witch moth clinging to the walls of her concrete prison, a creature who can erase entire events by simply refusing to watch them. The monster she must convince is me. The event she wants me to erase is her inevitable murder, but the universe demands a sacrifice. A balance must be restored, and only her death will restore it. I know the lesson I’m meant to learn is that her life was never mine to save. I only have one question. What will it cost me to steal it?
Mute, heartless, and tormented by auditory hallucinations, Madeleine Lavoie never questions why her family has hidden her from the world. But the night her brother casts her out, she learns the mysterious voice she thought existed only in her mind is no delusion, and no matter how hard she tries, she can never disobey it.
Now Madeleine must find her own voice in a cacophony of powerful tyrants, monsters, and gods. If she fails, she will forfeit her life and the lives of everyone who loves her. But if she succeeds, she may finally gain the ability to love someone in return.
- Don’t fool yourself. Fool everyone else, but never fool yourself.
When a young golem called Kaspar befriends a beautiful baker and her daughter, he wishes, for the first time in his life, to be more than just a counterfeit, wooden child. But such a simple wish comes at a high price, and Kaspar won’t be the only one to pay.
With the few who can stop him distracted by their own dreams, Kaspar is free to set in motion a naive and gruesome plan. He hasn’t gone entirely unnoticed, though. He’s a powerful weapon left alone and ungoverned, and he’s already caught the eye of someone with an even more costly wish.
You don’t want to read this book. I’m warning you.
This isn’t a heartwarming, boy-meets-girl, high school romance. I wish it were—God, do I ever. No, if you read this, you’re going to be angry… with me, mostly. You’ll probably yell at me, if you’re the type of person who yells at books. You’ll tell me not to be so stupid, but I won’t listen. I’ll be exactly as stupid as I need to be to destroy everything I love because that’s who I am: a walking, talking tragedy. That’s who I’ve always been.
But if you’re determined to read on despite my warning, I may as well introduce myself. My name is Claude Frollo, I’m nineteen going on ninety, and this is my story. It isn’t pretty, but it’s honest. And it’s the only story I have left to tell.
Jodi Lamm 