Award-winning author Kelly Jacobson (Tink and Wendy, Robin and Her Misfits) delivers her latest fairytale retelling in this cross between the classic Pinocchio and a Stephen King novel like The Gunslinger, Paige (a queer eighteen-year-old girl) is a wooden toymaker’s daughter dragged from state to state as her mother, Petta Vitaly, hawks her creations from their caravan. When they finally return to Petta’s hometown, Paige discovers Toy Palace, her family’s animatronic toy business, but she keeps the discovery from her mother—only to find that she has begun to turn into a wooden marionette.
With the help of two girls who use Paige’s interest in them to pull off the heist, Paige breaks into Toy Palace and finds out some of the family history her mother has been hiding from her. Though Paige is abandoned by the two girls, she discovers a captive fairy in one of the upper rooms of Toy Palace, Prince Alexio, who shows her that an entire realm, the Land of Toys, has been destroyed by fairies called the Deathsprites—and that her family has been using Prince Alexio’s powers to help the evil fairies gain power through the animatronic toys they have been selling for the last eighteen years.
Unable to cope with this new information, Paige runs away from Toy Palace and the captive prince, but her mother and a Toy Palace manager end up rescuing Prince Alexio instead. He finds Paige and takes her to the Land of Toys, where the Deathsprites have been turning sweet toys into terrible monsters determined to kill everything in their path. With the help of the talking cricket and Paige’s newfound strength as a marionette, the two must cross the realm of piled toy parts and frightful creations to stop the Deathsprites from making a portal to Earth that will bring destruction on that planet, too.
Lies of a Toymaker is a queer feminist YA retelling of the classic that reexamines what it means to “lie” for the benefit of others, and how the lines between truth and fiction are not always as clear as they seem. The book is told from several different perspectives, but follows Paige’s journey most centrally. Many classics from the original story make an appearance, such as the whale, the talking cricket, the fox and the cat, and the Fairy with Azure Hair.
Why, dear reader, must you NEVER EVER trust fish?
In the waning days of World War One, William Somerset Maugham—novelist, playwright, and spy—is sent to Romania to serve allied interests in the fight against Austro-Hungary while dying of tuberculosis. His handler sets him to recruit mysterious Carpathian nobleman Walter Roşu to the cause. But Roşu is more interested in William than the war, and William struggles to fulfill his duty in the face of death and desire.
A world divided cannot stand.
In the canton of Yarrowdale, at the very edge of the Empire’s reach, a Treasury officer has disappeared into thin air—vanishing from a room within a heavily guarded tower, its door and windows locked from the inside.
From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (we’re told) heralds the dawning of a new world—a halcyon age of art, prosperity, and rebirth. Hogwash! or so says award-winning novelist and historian Ada Palmer. In Inventing the Renaissance, Palmer turns her witty and irreverent eye on the fantasies we’ve told ourselves about Europe’s not-so-golden age, myths she sets right with sharp clarity.
Thara Celehar has lost his ability to speak with the dead. When that title of Witness for the Dead is gone, what defines him?
A brand new suspense novel from “the master of the suburban scandal” (Samantha M. Bailey), Aggie Blum Thompson.
Grimshaw Griswald Grimsby may have one case under his belt, but he’s still a novice Auditor in Boston’s Department of Unorthodox Affairs. And he’s already made mistakes.
Grief-stricken over her mother’ s death and bruised by her failure on her most recent case, Special Agent Emmeline Helliwell with the National Park Service returns to her Utah hometown to heal and regroup. She’ s determined to turn in her badge and take over her mother’ s bakery for a much quieter life . . . until the body of a childhood friend turns up in The Narrows of Zion National Park.