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INTERMEDIATE FICTION
Fagan, Deva

The Mirrorwood

304 pp. | Atheneum | April, 2022 | Trade ISBN 978-1-5344-9714-6 $17.99 | Ebook ISBN 978-1-5344-9716-0 $10.99
(2) 4-6 Born outside the Mirrorwood, a place full of magic surrounded by an impenetrable thorn thicket (not the only fairy-tale allusion here), protagonist Fable tries to hide her "twist": cursed to have no face of her own, she must steal faces from others. Now pursued by blighthunters (including the determined young Vycorax), Fable flees with her talking cat, Moth, into the Mirrorwood, but Vycorax is able to get through the thorns as well. Fable convinces her that together they can end the blight (including Fable's own twist) by defeating the demon prince at the heart of the Mirrorwood and awakening the true prince. But they learn that they will have to kill the demon prince, using the sharpest tooth of a near-mythical beast called the Withering, and it's all a bit more than Fable has signed on for. The author excels in setting expectations and then subverting them: the Withering offers advice; the demon prince turns out to be nice; a blessing given to the true prince turns out to be a curse. Fable's twist ties in to themes of identity and self-confidence with gratifying neatness as the novel unfolds in unexpected directions through Fable's and Vycorax's ­competing motivations and pushes through multiple complications to a highly ­satisfactory conclusion.
Reviewer: Anita L. Burkam | Horn Book Magazine Issue: May, 2022

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