Nuclear war, disease, zombies: these are the standard premises around which most apocolyptic fiction books are built. Janni Lee Simner bucks the trend with this tense, horror-filled YA novel about the end of the world as we know it.15 year old Liza can't remember a time when plants and forests didn't crave the taste of human blood. She lives in a small village, where the residents fortify their homes against the bloodthirsty faerie magic, and cast out anyone who shows any signs of magic of their own.
It's a tenuous, dangerous existence, and Liza finds out how close she is to disaster when her father casts out her newborn sister for having silver faerie eyes. Just a week after her sister's death, Liza's mother disappears from the village: everyone gives her up as lost, for surely no-one could survive in the sinister forests that surround the town.
When Liza discovers that the faerie magic is growing in her, she knows that she must flee the village for the safety of her friends and family. Matthew, a boy who also shows a glimmer of faerie magic, decides to go with her. Together, they decide to search for Liza's mother in the deadly forest: neither one knows anything about the world beyond their village's boundaries, and so their search is blind. Slowly they realize that finding Liza's mother may shed light on the origins of the cataclysmic war between humans and faeries, and that their hybrid faerie magic may be the key to finding a new way of life in a world where humans are no longer the peak species.
Fantasy/thriller
Grades 10-12
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