Donald Maass Literary Agency

Booklist: Little Badger returns to the world of her revelatory, award-winning debut, Elatsoe (2020). Seventeen-year-old Lipan Apache Shane and her mother, Lorenza, set out on a search-and-rescue mission to find two young siblings missing in Texas hill country. In this alternate 1970s America, fairy rings are transport centers. The missing seem to have stumbled on a group of dangerously unpredictable (and potentially world-destroying) mimic rings. They could be anywhere—and anytime. After Lorenza vanishes too, Shane undertakes her first solo rescue with the help of her ghost dog, Nellie. (Like all of the women in her family, going back to her four-greats-grandmother, Elatsoe, Shane is a ghostraiser, able to summon insects, birds, and animals to her aid.) The search takes them to a deserted lakeside town hiding a monster, to the site of a notorious Colorado mimic ring disaster, and, ultimately, Below—to the underworld. Shane’s progress is interspersed with family history, stories, and flashbacks to the traumatic loss of their home eight years earlier. A slower pace allows readers to absorb each inventive twist, unexpected encounter, jolt of creepy menace, and dreamy illustration. It also gives them a chance to know the family and friends, old and new, past and present, who witness and support Shane’s growing determination to not only survive and return home but also thrive and find justice.

Washington Post: Fairies have starred in some terrific books of late, but in Mohamed’s novella they pack a lot more menace. In “The Butcher of the Forest,” the children of a despot known only as the Tyrant wander into an enchanted forest from which nobody has ever emerged, except a woman named Veris. Naturally, the Tyrant forces Veris to go rescue his kids, using her nimbleness to evade the snares and dangers in the woods, while grappling with the ethics of saving the children of a monster. Mohamed excels at telling the stories of ordinary people trapped by dark forces, and she infuses these characters with astounding tenderness and compassion. “The Butcher of the Forest” shows exactly why Mohamed is one of fantasy’s rising stars.

New York Times: Premee Mohamed’s THE BUTCHER OF THE FOREST is a genre-blending adventure full of bizarre creatures and dark magic. At the center of this novel is a forbidden forest that sits at the northern edge of a nameless town. No one who sets foot in the wood returns, with the exception of Veris Thorn, who once entered, somehow survived and came back. Now, the ruthless foreign tyrant who rules the region has pulled Veris from her home and given her a task: Go back into the forest and retrieve his children who are ensnared there. The tyrant gives Veris only one day to recover them, and if she fails, he will kill her family.

Fast-paced, tense, fantastical and uncanny, “The Butcher of the Forest” is a perfect mix of horror and fantasy. The perilous dimension hidden inside the forest is full of wicked shape-shifting beings, undead deer and other monstrosities, but it’s Mohamed’s beautiful prose and endearing characters that make this a powerful story.