This enthralling Beauty and the Beast-inspired retelling is Naomi Novik’s Uprooted meets Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thrones and Roses, delivering all the high stakes and steamy intensity that make it every fantasy romance fan’s perfect next read.
SILVER AND BLOOD
Book 1
by Jessie Mihalik
Avon, 2025
(via Nancy Yost Literary)
© 2018 Dustin Mihalik
When Riela, an untrained magic wielder, agrees to venture into the dark forest to kill the deadly beast that has been attacking her fellow villagers, she accepts the responsibility even though it likely means her death. The last thing she thought to encounter while battling one of the forest beasts was a powerful, scarred, and strikingly handsome mage.
Riela awakens in a magical castle complete with a gorgeous library, a strange wolf, and the surly man who saved her life. Riela soon learns Garrick is not a mortal mage at all—he’s a powerful Etheri sovereign who has been locked out of his kingdom in Lohka for nearly a century, and his powers are weakening.
Trapped in his castle and surrounded by the dangerous woods, Riela and Garrick fight a losing battle against the desire growing between them. But the more they discover about Riela’s magic, the more suspicious Garrick grows of her identity. As they unravel the secrets connecting Riela’s past to Lohka, the tenuous threads of trust between Riela and Garrick begin to fray because her life—or her death—might be the key to regaining everything he’s lost.
Jessie Mihalik writes romantic fantasy and science fiction packed with found family, action, adventure, and badass women.
Camille has always preferred animals to people. The wild has nearly disappeared, but as a zookeeper at the last zoo in the world, on Alcatraz Island, she spends her days caring for playful chimpanzees, gentle tree frogs, and a restless jaguar. Outside, resistance groups and brutal cartels fight to shape the world’s future, but Camille is safe within her routines. That is, until a new zookeeper, Sailor, arrives from Paris.
In Half Moon Bay, California, 2016, a young woman waits for her father’s sailboat to arrive at port. They have agreed to meet on this day and time. Yet he never shows. He had told her this day might come. And if it did, she was ready. Go to the library in Berkeley, find a certain book, follow the instructions. But what if the instructions lead to more questions than answers? 
There is no land without blood, and i water this land with the blood of my men.
THE UMBRELLA MAKER’S SON follows the remarkable odyssey of 17 year old Reuven Berkowitz at the outset of World War II, whose family is sent into turmoil with the fall of Nazi bombs on their Jewish neighborhood of Kazmiereze. It is only a matter of time before the family’s umbrella making business, their apartment, their wealth and their dignity are destroyed by the Nazis. After a nighttime confrontation with an SS officer goes dangerously wrong, Reuven makes a harrowing escape from besieged Krakow to the countryside where he is taken in by a sympathetic Christian farmer and his demanding and antisemitic wife. From there, Reuven eventually journeys back to the horrors of the Nazi ghetto that Krakow has become in search of the young woman he has loved since childhood.