The Forest Demands Its Due
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
A Lesson in Vengeance meets The Taking of Jake Livingston in this page-turning YA horror/fantasy set in dark academia about a queer Black teen who discovers the sinister history of his boarding school and the corrupt powers behind it all. A USA Today bestseller!
Regent Academy has a long and storied history in Winslow, Vermont, as does the forest that surrounds it. The school is known for molding teens into leaders, but its history is far more nefarious.
Seventeen-year-old Douglas Jones wants nothing to do with Regent's king-making; he’s just trying to survive. But then a student is murdered and, for some reason, by the next day no one remembers him having ever existed, except for Douglas and the groundskeeper's son, Everett Everley. In his determination to uncover the truth, Douglas awakens a horror hidden within the forest, unearthing secrets that have been buried for centuries. A vengeful creature wants blood as payment for a debt more than three hundred years in the making—or it will swallow all of Winslow in darkness.
And for the first time in his life, Douglas might have a chance to grasp the one thing he’s always felt was missing: power. But if he’s not careful, he will find out that power has a tendency to corrupt absolutely everything.
A high-octane mystery of murder and magic for fans of Ace of Spades, House of Hollow, and Get Out!
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jackson (Under the Dome) examines themes of heartbreak, magic, and queer love in this exhilarating fantasy horror novel. Students are disappearing from Regent Academy, an ultra-exclusive boarding school in Winslow, Vt. And it's not just their bodies that go missing—everyone's memories of them vanish, too. Seventeen-year-old Douglas Jones, a Black queer scholarship student, seems to be the only person who remembers the teen who was found murdered on the perimeter of the school's forest. Things get even stranger when Douglas—who has been hearing voices coming from the woods—is thrust into a world of magic after awakening in the forest covered in blood. Accompanied by the 17-year-old son of the groundskeeper who's been tasked with keeping watch over the forest and the deadly creatures that live within it, Douglas must untangle Winslow's dark history or risk being swallowed up by the mythical forest's darkness. Uneven pacing and simplistic prose sometimes stymie the intricate worldbuilding. Still, the pulse-pounding twists, riveting premise, and the enticing character dynamics formed amid intriguing magical troubles ensure that readers will want to follow along to the end. Ages 14–up.
