Dead Flowers

Bella Amanita is, as her guidance counselor once put it, “a challenging case”. She swears, sleeps through class, and she’s always had a knack for saying just the things people don’t need to hear. Bella never met a person she could not manipulate, a truth she could not twist. If falling through a portal into a world of magic would fix anybody’s interpersonal issues, she would not be the person. And yet, she and her calculus teacher, and a handful of her most irritating classmates, find themselves in just this situation. As it turns out, the broom closet in Room 134 is a gateway to the Feywood, a land of trickster gods and vengeful spirits, where ideas hold the power to shape reality. Bella has spent her whole life trying to read the intentions of others, only to find that they are tangible things she can see in this strange new world. Bella is determined to make lemonade out of her transdimensional lemons, and it’s not long before she stumbles into an opportunity to gain some real power. The kind of power that better humans than her have killed for. She will have to ask herself how far she’s willing to go to change her life for the better, and whether there’s anybody out there worth fighting for, besides herself.

Dead Flowers is a YA urban fantasy novel. Based on folklore depictions of the Fey, starring a protagonist consumed by narcissism and pathological lies - That is to say, the type of person who fits in perfectly with her new supernatural environment. How do the moral lessons of old fairy tales stack up against modern conceptions of ethical behavior? How do the masks we wear, shape the people underneath? And what intrinsic value does truth hold, in a world where inconvenient truths are so often discarded? Manuscript currently in progress.