A Polish folklore reimagining of Beauty and the Beast, Where the Dark Stands Still is beautifully written and explores themes of trauma, repression and acceptance. This one will make you feel all the feels, from terror to heartbreak and everything in between.
Liska knows that magic is monstrous, and its practitioners are monsters. She has done everything possible to suppress her own magic, to disastrous consequences. Desperate to be free of it, Liska flees her small village and delves into the dangerous, demon-inhabited spirit-wood to steal a mythical fern flower. If she plucks it, she can use its one wish to banish her powers. Everyone who has sought the fern flower has fallen prey to unknown horrors, so when Liska is caught by the demon warden of the wood—called The Leszy—a bargain seems better than death: one year of servitude in exchange for the fern flower and its wish.
Whisked away to The Leszy’s crumbling manor, Liska soon makes an unsettling discovery: she is not the first person to strike this bargain, and all her predecessors have mysteriously vanished. If Liska wants to survive the year and return home, she must unravel her taciturn host’s spool of secrets and face the ghosts—figurative and literal—of his past. Because something wakes in the woods, something deadly and without mercy. It frightens even The Leszy...and cannot be defeated unless Liska embraces the monster she’s always feared becoming.
Product Details
ISBN-13: 9781665936477
Media Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books
Publication Date: 02-27-2024
Pages: 368
Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.50(d)
Age Range: 14 - 18 Years
About the Author
A. B. Poranek grew up in Canada but spent her summers in the Polish countryside, reading under apple trees and helping care for her grandfather’s chickens. Her love of animals led her to pursue a degree in veterinary medicine, though she never stopped writing along the way. Her first novel, Where the Dark Stands Still, is an ode to Poland’s wild woodlands, wilder folktales, and the girls who were raised by them.