“Oh my gosh this book is stunning! Based on Polish folklore, the story weaves Catholicism with the world of magic and demons. Liska fights to overcome her guilt of possessing magic while being raised in a Catholic village on the edge of a spooky forest full of real demons. Making things more complicated, she starts to fall for the hot demon guardian of the woods, the Leszy. Where the Dark Stands Still is an enchanting blend of Naomi Novik's Uprooted and Ava Reid's The Wolf and the Woodsman. Please do yourself a favor and pick up this book!”
Publisher Margaret K. McElderry Books
Publication Date 2024-02-27
Section Young Adult / All Staff Suggestions / Suggestions for Kids / Jac A.
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9781665936477
A girl with dangerous magic makes a risky bargain with a demon to be free of her monstrous power in this young adult fantasy perfect for fans of An Enchantment of Ravens and House of Salt and Sorrows.
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.