Books

Holly Black Has a Big Announcement for Faerie Fans

by Caitlin White

If you know young adult fantasy, you know Holly Black. And if you loved her 2015 novel The Darkest Part of the Forest , Black has a gift for you: Black will publish her new The Folk of Air trilogy, a series devoted to delving deeper into the faerie world she introduced in her latest book. The only downside? We all have to wait until 2018 for the first book, The Cruel Prince. Books two and three are set for 2019 and 2020, but are currently untitled, and a digital novella is part of the deal as well.

The Darkest Part of the Forest introduced YA readers to the Fairfold, a town where humans and magical fae live side by side in an uneasy sort of peace. But the peace is destroyed when siblings Hazel and Ben free the boy in a glass coffin with horns on his head, the imprisoned faerie Prince Severin, sparking a war between humans and faeries. All along, Hazel and Ben feared the mysterious, dangerous magic the faeries hold, but now they know why. Black's new The Folk of Air trilogy will go further into this magic and the fae, because she knows just what we readers really want.

"This series will delve deeper into the strange, glittering, malicious courts of Faerie than I’ve gone before," Black says in a release to Entertainment Weekly.

According to the publisher Little, Brown Books for Young Readers who scored the deal with Black, The Folk of Air trilogy centers on "a young human girl who witnesses her parents’ deaths and is forcibly taken to Faerieland with her two sisters — one faery, one human — where she will grow up and one day fight to gain power."

Female centered? Check. More cool and dangerous faeries? Check. Holly Black writing more of anything at all? Check check.

If you're thinking that you'll never be able to wait until 2018, remember this: The Cosmos Blade, Black's second book of the Magisterium series alongside other YA fantasy queen Cassandra Clare, is set for 2016 to hold you over.

The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black, $7, Amazon | The Cruel Prince by Holly Black, $13, Amazon

Image: BlackHolly.com