About this item
Highlights
- Lily is a girl who discovers she has the ability to see how others will die simply by touching them.
- Author(s): Michael Thomas Ford
- 266 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Fantasy
Description
About the Book
When her mother sells Lily to a preacher and his traveling tent revival, Lily finds herself thrust into a world of greed and manipulation that threatens to destroy her unless she can find a way back.
Book Synopsis
Lily is a girl who discovers she has the ability to see how others will die simply by touching them. Only she doesn't want this gift and takes extreme measures to protect herself from it. When her mother--because every fairy tale has to have a wicked (step)mother--sells Lily's services to an evangelical preacher and his wildly popular traveling tent revival, Lily is torn away from the idyllic place she's always known as home and thrust into a world of greed and manipulation that threatens to destroy her unless she can find a way back ... if she survives the quest the old witch Baba Yaga has given her...or the attention of the tent revivalist who promises to save her soul. Lily features the eerie artwork of Staven Andersen and the moving words of award-winning author Michael Thomas Ford.
Review Quotes
"As Andersen has done for the book's beautifully bizarre yet detailed illustrations, Ford has filled his novel with customs and side stories-some no more than a sentence or two-that make the world feel real, wonderful, and horrifying simultaneously...this novel is at heart a fairy tale in the grand, dark tradition of the best of such stories; the book speaks to the reader's deepest fears and highest hopes, told through the odyssey of a girl who is scared by what is happening around her and within her." - Kirkus Reviews
"Not since Katherine Dunn's Geek Love has a cast of carnival workers been so darkly delightful or terrifyingly twisted. Lily's journey is a treacherous one, not only through the physical world but through the ethereal world, as she struggles to make sense of magic, religion, and 'the woman' growing inside her. You'll be as taken with Lily as is the joyfully mischievous Baba Yaga, as she shadows the girl's every move, acting as the fairy godmother you never knew you wanted. Michael Thomas Ford weaves a delicate tale of love and cruelty in Lily so expertly you will pray he never runs out of straw to spin." - Dayna Ingram, author of All Good Children