Francesca Zappia

Dark, twisty, and filled with trippy illustrations; this young adult book will stay with you. Cat is stuck in hell, or at least she imagines what hell would be. She's trapped in a living, breathing high school and she and the other students are slowly being transformed into monsters. If that wasn't bad enough something is roaming the halls and killing students. None of the teens have any memory of how they got there or what life was like before, but they are all desperate to escape. As Cat tries to find out who is killing her friends she starts to get flashbacks from her old life. Her life where she was an artist and her best friend was Jeremy. Are these memories a clue to how she got here? Are they clues on how to escape. The whole book is so weird and I had no idea where it was going until the very end. Inventive and unique storytelling. No spoilers, but it's pretty heartbreaking.… (more)

Zora is a teen living in a small Indiana town and she’s, essentially, an outcast. This is because her father is in prison for swindling a majority of the townspeople, but also because everyone thinks she’s the one setting fires all over town, when really it’s the Firestarter she’s hunting down, a demon-like creature that possesses human bodies and feeds off ghost energy. The ability to see those ghosts helps her hunting skills, but not her outsideriness, and her prickly nature probably doesn’t help matters, either. When the school janitor dies in a house fire, though, things really, um, heat up, and Zora teams up with another Firestarter – whose motives are suspect but his jaw is chiseled so we’ll give him the benefit – to track down the real culprit before it’s all too late.

I enjoyed this one a great deal. Zora is a cool character: her prickly nature is excellent, and I love that she’s sort of into the Love Interest but it’s definitely a sidebar for her after the mission at hand. There are a couple of nice little twists in the plot, too.… (more)

LOVED this book so hard! This is my favorite Zappia novel to date. I loved this village and all the people in it. The storytelling was beautiful - if the characters aged up, this would easily read as an adult novel. This is one book that I plan on keeping and re-reading. Greymist Fair is a little village in the middle of the woods, some people never make it there and the villagers never leave. They know to stay out of the forests, for death lurks within. Each tale is a retelling of old Grim fairy tales and they all connect to the town. The Grim tales that are "retold" aren't necessarily the common ones and most children would never know them. I myself didn't know a few. The storytelling is beautiful, the setting is beautiful, the characters are complicated and interesting.… (more)