For more than two hundred years, the Owens women had been blamed for everything that went wrong in their Massachusetts town. And Gillian and Sally endured that fate as well; as children, the sisters were outsiders. Their elderly aunts almost seemed to encourage the whispers of witchery, but all Gillian and Sally wanted was to escape. One would do so by marrying, the other by running away. But the bonds they shared brought them back, almost as if by magic ...

In this contemporary poetic retelling of the iconic myth, a teenage girl fleeing an abusive home takes refuge in the woods with a fairy-tale witch.

A desperate orphan turned pirate and a rebellious imperial daughter find a connection on the high seas in a world divided by colonialism and threaded with magic. Aboard the pirate ship Dove, Flora the girl takes on the identity of Florian the man to earn the respect and protection of the crew. The brutal life of a pirate is about survival: don't trust, don't stick out, don't feel. When the pirates prepare to sell their unsuspecting passengers into slavery, Flora is drawn to the Lady Evelyn Hasegawa, who is en route to a dreaded arranged marriage with her own casket in tow. The pair set into motion a wild escape that will free a captured mermaid (coveted for her blood, which causes men to have visions and lose memories) and involve the mysterious Pirate Supreme, an opportunistic witch, and the all-encompassing Sea itself.

"In the third in the "spellbinding" (Seanan McGuire) series from the author of the Calliope Reaper-Jones novels, magic has been loosed upon the world--and the consequences could destroy all of humanity, magical and non-magical alike... Lyse MacAllister used to be like everyone else--blissfully ignorant of magic, of the dire battles being fought in shadows and secrecy. But that was before her great-aunt Eleanora died, leaving her in control of the Echo Park coven; before she found herself in the middle of the witches' clash with the anti-magic zealots known as The Flood; before her blood sisters lost their faith in her. As The Flood begins turning humans across the globe against the witches, Lyse must find a way to regain the trust of her former magical family and once again unify them. Because the final battle between good and evil is looming--and if the witches don't stand together, all of humankind could be lost.."--

Move over, urban fantasy--here comes "suburban" fantasy. What self-respecting witch, vampire, or werewolf would be caught dead--or undead--anywhere but the Big City, you may ask? Look, let's give the uncanny crew a little credit for intelligence: If they had the smarts to see the advantage in packing up and moving "into" the cities, why wouldn't they have the smarts to move "out" of said cities if it looked like they could get a better quality-of-life/death elsewhere? (Tough enough going about your otherworldly business and evading the occasional mob wielding halogen torches and designer pitchforks, but have you ever "seen" city real estate prices?) So let's welcome our first group of supernatural suburbanites, the witches. Their powers are awesome, their methods of coping with the lumps, bumps, and idiosyncrasies of Suburbia are ingenious, and they always bring the loveliest gingerbread to the PTA bake sale. But whatever you do, don't try telling them that life in a non-city setting is bland, banal and boring, or you might get turned into . . . "ribbit! " Stories of suburban sorcery by Harry Turtledove, Sarah A. Hoyt, Jan and S.M. Stirling, K. D. Wentworth, and more--including Esther Friesner herself.