Fiendish

Product description Clementine DeVore spent ten years trapped in a cellar, pinned down by willow roots, silenced and forgotten. Now she’s out and determined to uncover who put her in that cellar and why. When Clementine was a child, dangerous and inexplicable things started happening in New South Bend. The townsfolk blamed the fiendish people out in the Willows and burned their homes to the ground. But magic kept Clementine alive, walled up in the cellar for ten years, until a boy named Fisher sets her free. Back in the world, Clementine sets out to discover what happened all those years ago. But the truth gets muddled in her dangerous attraction to Fisher, the politics of New South Bend, and the Hollow, a fickle and terrifying place that seems increasingly temperamental ever since Clementine reemerged. Review Praise for Fiendish: “… eerily reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird…This beguiling amalgamation of the magical and modern worlds will have readers mesmerized.” -- Kirkus (Starred Review) “ Powerful, evocative prose brings to life a world close to overflowing with wild magic, seething prejudice, and base fear.” – Horn Book " Yovanoff’s best book since The Replacement (2010) finds her conjuring up another sickly sweet modern mythology of seemingly effortless originality. [...] No one since Francesca Lia Block has so consistently sided with the so-called monsters, and this dark-sparkled effort furthers the author’s reputation as one of YA horror’s most unique voices." -Booklist “… deliciously creepy…The early descriptions of Clementine’s decade-long entrapment in the cellar and her rescue are at turns vivid and horrifying, and become engraved in the reader’s memory.” - VOYA "Yovanoff creates yet another beautiful but disturbing setting, with elegant prose describing the picturesque countryside in one paragraph and the gut-wrenching stench of hellhounds in the next..." - BCCB "Yovanoff’s writing is as thrilling and uneasy as the tales she spins. Richly detailed with adolescent “firsts,” ... this horror tale will give teens goosebumps from start to finish." - School Library Journal About the Author Brenna Yovanoff is the New York Times bestselling author of The Replacement, The Space Between, and Paper Valentine. She currently lives in Denver with her husband. Visit her online at www.brennayovanoff.com. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. PART I THE LAST DAY When I was little, everything twinkled. Trees and clouds all seemed to shine around the edges. At night, the stars were long tails of light, smeared across the sky like paint. The whole county glowed. Back then, my life was mostly pieces—tire swings and lemonade, dogwood petals drifting down and going brown in the grass. Cotton dresses, bedsheets flapping on the line. An acre of front porch. A year of hopscotch rhymes. On the hottest days, I kicked off my shoes and ran out to the middle of the low-water bridge. The air was warm and buzzing. The creek raced along under me, bright as broken glass. I jumped rope with my cousin, who was older and shiny. Shiny like an opal ring or a ballerina, and Shiny because it was her name. She hooked her pinky in mine and swore how when we were old enough, we’d run away from Hoax County and live in a silver camper on a beach somewhere. We’d be best friends forever. Later, when everything went dark, I tried to think how the bad thing had started, but the pieces wouldn’t come. No matter how I walked myself back through that last day, there was always a point where time stopped. A sheet seemed to loom in my mind, and no matter how I pressed my nose against it, I couldn’t see past. There were things I knew. I knew my mama had been making skillet chicken for dinner, because I remembered running out to the garden to pull some onions for the gravy, and how when I crawled down through the vegetable patch, the place under the tomatoes smelled like hay. It was warm and sweet, and for a while, I just sat smelling it, singing the