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''Feminist, fierce, and wildly fresh. Hochhauser''s prose is poetic, her story hypnotic, and her characters will live in my head and heart forever. Lady Tremaine is destined to be one of the biggest books of the year'' GLENNON DOYLE ''I''ve been warned to be wary of strangers in the woods since I was a little girl. But just as shadows serve to hide and disguise, they also provide privacy and solitude, and, if you look carefully, beauty.'' Widow twice-over, Etheldreda has learned that marriage can be violent - even if her husbands were not. Saddled with the care of two children, a priggish stepdaughter, and a razor-taloned peregrine falcon, her whole life has become a ruse like the slumping manor hall they live in: grand and ornate on the exterior, and crumbling, brick by brick, inside. Fierce in the face of her misfortune, Etheldreda clings to her family''s respectability, the lifeboat that will float her daughters along the gentle tides of stability, straight into the secure banks of marriage. When a royal ball offers the chance to secure the future she desperately desires, Etheldreda must risk her secrets, pride, and coffers in pursuit of an invitation for her daughters - only to see her hopes fulfilled by the wrong one. As an engagement unfolds with unnerving speed, she unearths a sordid secret hidden in the depths of the royal family, forcing a choice between the security she''s sought for so many years and the wellbeing of a feckless stepdaughter who has rebuffed her at every turn.
