The Bone Brides

Hayao Miyazaki meets Guillermo del Toro in this Sapphic YA portal fantasy in which a girl must save her changeling girlfriend from a terrifying faery realm.

Nola James can handle it. She can handle that her father is dead. She can handle that her friends, bored with her grief, left her behind. Nola James has to handle it because Lumi―the love of her life and a faery changeling―is in danger. Not only is Lumi’s human mother trying to kill her, but she’s being hunted by veiled monsters that want to return her to the fae. Hiding out in an abandoned cabin with only a skeleton-rabbit for company is hard, but Nola can handle it. And she does.

Until Lumi is abducted.

In order to save her, Nola must enter the faery realm: a boggy world in which eyeless horses parade as brides, ghost-bees produce transformative honey, and skeletons dance in skin-colored cloaks. Aided by a witch-girl with uncertain motives, Nola uncovers the realm’s terrifying power over changelings. Unless Nola can outplay an abyssal faery queen and find the courage to let the world see her own pain, Lumi will be trapped―not only in faeryland but in a skin that’s not her own.