Goblin Market
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
One sister must save the other from a goblin prince in this rich, spooky, and delightfully dark fantasy!
"TERRIFICALLY TIMELESS. . . SPLENDID."—Shelf Awareness
Lizzie and Minka are sisters, but they’re nothing alike: Minka is outgoing and cheerful, while Lizzie is shy and sensitive. Nothing much ever happens in their sleepy village—there are fields to tend, clothes to mend, and weekly trips to the market, predictable as the turning of the seasons. Lizzie likes it that way. It’s safe. It’s comfortable. She hopes nothing will ever change.
But one day, Minka meets a boy.
A boy who gives her a plum to eat.
He is charming. He is handsome. He tells her that she’s special. He tells her no one understands her like he does—not her parents, not her friends, not even Lizzie. He tells her she should come away with him, into the darkness, into the forest. . . .
Minka has been bewitched and ensnared by a zdusze—a goblin. His plum was poison, his words are poison, and strange things begin to happen. Trees bleed, winds howl, a terrible sickness descends on Minka, and deep in the woods, in a place beyond sunshine, beyond reality, a wedding table has been laid. . . .
To save her sister, Lizzie will have to find courage she never knew she had—courage to confront the impossible—and enter into a world of dreams, danger, and death.
Rich world-building inspired by both Polish folklore and the poetry of Christina Rossetti combines with a tender sister story in this thrilling novel from Diane Zahler.
"Lush. . . Dreamy. . . Breath-quickening."—The Horn Book
"Resonates with emotion."—BCCB
"Believably wrought."—Publishers Weekly
"Will entice readers looking for some chills."—Kirkus Reviews
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in an unidentified region of what cues strongly as Poland, Zahler's (Daughter of the White Rose) folklore-based fantasy is rooted in the bond between sisters Elzbieta, called Lizzie, and Minka, who are vastly different from, yet devoted to, one another. Synesthete Lizzie, extremely anxious among people, thrives on solitude, while merry Minka, a talented painter, flourishes selling the family's bread and produce at the village market. Lizzie's perceptions involve seeing sounds in color: leaves rustling in spring are silver, Minka's voice is pink, and a thunderstorm is "a vortex" that makes her dizzy and nauseated. After Minka returns from the market infatuated with handsome fruit purveyor Emil and the delicious plum he gave her, Lizzie is suspicious. Her suspicions turn to fright when Minka succumbs to a delirious fever, and her golden hair turns gray and falls out. Meeting Emil and finding that no hue attends his voice, Lizzie is certain he is behind Minka's strange illness. Fueled by love for her sibling, Lizzie becomes entangled in the world of zdusze, forest goblins of lore who entice and capture girls. As elements of horror build to an extended climax teeming with fiends, Lizzie's evolution from "shy, strange and fearful" to strong and determined is believably wrought, even as Minka's transformation is less credible. All characters read as white. Ages 10–14.
