Bones of Faerie Book

This is an amazing book. I am unnerved at the way I kept managing to lose it around the house from the time it came out (when I got it) until I found it for the sixth time yesterday and chose to read it instantly before it lost itself again. It makes you wonder about things like faeries, which is nonsense! Right?

The reason I ticked sf as well as fantasy is because the characters live in a bleak and scary world, the result of a war between humans and fae. Almost all the things we taken for granted are gone--or changed. Trees are vicious and will attack and kill humans. Butterflies burst into flame without warning. Rivers call people to their doom. Vegetables fight being harvested. And in Liza's village, the taint of the Faery--clear hair, silver eyes, magic--means expulsion or death. Only three weeks before, her father, in charge of clearing magic from the town, took his brand new daughter and left her on a hilltop. In the morning only bones remained. Not long afterward, Liza's mother left him.

Liza decides, against her father's warnings and lessons, fixed in her flesh with beatings, to go in search of her mother. Though she forbids him to do it, her friend Matthew goes along, and his truth--that he is a shapeshifter--is the first of many things she will learn along the way, about the war, about other villages and how they manage, about the reality of magic and the Fae, about the future, and about her own magicless self.

The world is incredible and scary. Liz is a totally human hero, filled with doubts and bigotries she has to overcome. The book is dark, terrifying, and magnificent.