GENRE: MIDDLE GRADE/TEEN FANTASY

The Storyteller's Tale is an enchanting novel about a librarian with a wonderful gift and the mysterious suitor who proposes to her.

Iliad is a snatchwords: She can breathe life into words by speaking them aloud. Thanks to this wonderful gift, the young woman has become the most famous storyteller in the kingdom of Esmeria.

When she receives an anonymous and very advantageous marriage proposal from a member of the royal family, Iliad, chaperoned by her flamboyant grandmother, sets off to the capital, where she is to meet her mysterious suitor.

But Iliad, coming from a middle-class family with no money or title, doesn’t know anything about court life. With her peculiar sense of fashion and her awkwardness, she finds that life in Babel is more trying—and perilous—than she expected…

Excerpt from The Storyteller’s Tale

When Iliad finally went to bed, sleep evaded her. Gulliver’s Travels was lying on her beating heart. It was the first book she had ever snatched words from. Fifteen years ago, between the shelves of Pergamon’s library, she had whispered the words of Jonathan Swift. When the syllables passed her lips, the printed words started jiggling on the page. Thinking her eyes must be playing tricks on her, she stopped mid-sentence, then wiped her glasses and squinted at the stirring words. She must’ve been mistaken. All adjectives, nouns, and verbs were lying still, perfectly motionless.

She spoke again, her voice a whisper in the half-light. What started out as a slight vibration became an undeniable flutter, so she picked up speed. The sentence looked like it wanted out of the book. One by one, the letters detached themselves from the paper with a swish, hovering in the air. Wild-eyed, Iliad inspected them closely before brushing them with her index finger. The fugitive letters felt like cold, tiny, silken flames running aimlessly above her red hair. Iliad took hold of them the way she would a lost moth. She wrapped them around her fingers, then made them slide along her forearms. They winked out of existence when she closed the volume.

Iliad wanted to know what had become of the wandering words, so she reopened the book almost immediately, only to find them in their original spot. The little girl read them again, once more jolting them awake with her voice. She switched pace and intonation, but the letters took off all the same. The next line suffered the same fate. And the next, and the next, until Iliad had extracted an entire chapter from the novel.

Iliad decided to try another book. She wanted to know if the same would happen or if it was specific to Gulliver’s Travels. She tested out a geography textbook, then a play, and both times, the miracle came again. Little Iliad was positively shaken. She put the tomes away and swore to never read aloud again. Something about this whole affair felt dangerous. Ripping sentences out of books might just be worse than breathing fire. To unstick words was to steal them, and oral reading was but a guilty pleasure. Period.

Iliad stood firm for two whole weeks. In the end, curiosity got the better of her; she was just too fascinated with books! She tried again and again, plundering all manner of publications. The words always resumed their rightful place anyway, so it wasn’t really stealing, was it? She began experimenting with the dictionary, cramming as many words as she could within the confines of her bedroom. She tried opening two books at the same time, taking one idiom from the first and one preposition from the other, mixing writing styles and making worlds collide into space.