The story of a reluctant queen, as told by her daughter Sophia the Wise.

Twelve-year-old Lily finds herself questioning her faith when her newly adopted sister, Tessa, disrupts their home and intrudes on Lily's new-found love of horses, then has a serious accident just when she and Lily are beginning to get along.

Here, in rich detail, her day-by-day narrative and the editor's annotations bring to life Arizona's territorial capital of Prescott more than one hundred years ago. Lily gives us firsthand accounts of the operation of territorial government, of pressure from Anglo settlers to dispossess Pima Indians from their land, and of efforts by the governor and the army to deal with Indian scares. Here also, underlying her words, are insights into the dynamics of a close-knit Victorian family, shaping the life of an intelligent, educated single woman.

When sixteen-year-old sisters Lily and Rose take it upon themselves to aid a tiny man with a long beard, he curses them into a world of trouble. Trapped in a suffocating silent world of her own design, Lily contends with the grief that lies behind her and the threat of what might now lie ahead. Whether she believes it or not, leprechauns are real, and in Lugh she has made an unfortunate enemy. Now the race is on to save Rose from the deranged whims of an unscrupulous faery and find out what, or who, is behind this mysterious turn of events. To find the answers, Lily must face the darkness that plagues her: both inside and out. On the grand stage of this world and the Otherworld, an adventure bursts forth so chaotic perhaps even Lily can't silence it.

After her older sister is murdered in a horrific incident of domestic abuse, Taylor begins a new life in a new town. She meets Lily, whose open, warm manner conceals a difficult personal life of her own, coping with her brain-injured mother. The two girls embark on a tentative friendship. But just when life seems to be smoothing out, Taylor's abusive boyfriend, Devon, arrives on the scene, and before they know it, the girls find themselves in a situation that is both scary, and incredibly dangerous. Abetted by Conor, a friend who owes him a favor, Devon takes the girls to a remote cabin. There is no heat, no food, no water. There is a hunting rifle, which Devon uses to intimidate the others. As he becomes increasingly agitated, and Conor threatens to bail, the girls engage in a silent battle of their own. Lily wants to escape, while Taylor feels hopelessly trapped by her relationship with Devon and uses sex and flattery to try to keep the situation calm. The cabin becomes a pressure cooker, filled with tension as the four teenagers wrestle with their anger, fear, resentment and boredom - any one of which could tip the situation into disaster. From the opening moments when Taylor witnesses her sister's autopsy to the final cathartic scene after the two girls have survived their ordeal, the reader is glued to every page of this frank, gripping and beautifully written novel that raises questions for every teenager. Do you need to be a certain way to get a boyfriend? Can someone who loves you also hurt you? How can a million small compromises eat away at who you are? What happens when you don't think you deserve to be treated well? How do you end up in an abusive relationship, and what keeps you there? Elise Moser goes deeply into the hearts and minds of Lily and Taylor, who in the end save each other in unexpected ways.

“Look inside this world and find wonder.” —KATE BERNHEIMER, editor of My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me and author of The Girl Who Wouldn’t Brush Her Hair A book arrives by Owl, left under an old fir tree in the snow. With it, a mysterious message: another world’s scientists have discovered the laws of the universe are found in—fairy tales. Is it true? Snotty—the unlikely hero of this tale—is a streetwise adolescent mastermind transported to a mystical realm where the fate of the world rests on discovering who he really is. As Snotty’s perceptions of might and right are upended, the scholarly footnotes point toward a deeper truth—that in the endless fight against evil, the toughest warriors come from the most despised group of all: the smallest, the poorest, the funniest, the snottiest. A fantastic adventure story, smart political allegory, and philosophical treatise, this is a book to be savored by adults of all ages. The History of Arcadia series tells the story of a world that was literally formed by a story, by one person discovering and claiming who she really is . . . and of the subsequent events that led first to a deceptively happy world, then to an inevitably tragic outcome, and finally to a slow rebuilding of the world on foundations more deeply and thoughtfully laid. Each book includes bonus Arcadian legends and fairy tales, and relates how the manuscript crossed the barriers between Arcadia and our own world to arrive at Exterminating Angel Press. The first two novels in the series are Snotty Saves the Day and Lily the Silent. Tod Davies lives with her husband and her two dogs at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, in Boulder, Colorado and in the alpine valley of Colestin, Oregon, where she discovered Snotty Saves the Day, the first Arcadian manuscript. Illustrator Gary Zaboly is the author and illustrator of The Barack Obama Coloring Book (Dover Publications) and many books on American military and frontier history. He lives with his wife Cora in Riverdale, New York, overlooking the Hudson River.