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Read the entire first chapter below!
“Lizzie and Mika, me and you.
Even when we're ancient crones,
Rocking in our ancient chairs—
Grumbling ancient pea-green groans—
Combing out our ancient hairs—
Lizzie and Minka, just we two!”
~GOBLIN MARKET
Long-time fairy tale fans may already be familiar with Diane Zahler, who writes enchanting middle-grade novels revolving around some of our favorite beloved tales. With her new offering, GOBLIN MARKET, Zahler deftly plays in the world of Christina Rosetti's poem "Goblin Market." She does so well, taking the more mature elements and fashioning them into something appropriate for a middle-grade audience while still holding the allure of the original tale.
Sisters Lizzie and Minka are better together than apart, not alike, but able to balance one another well. Minka always goes to market to sell her family's produce, leaving Lizzie safely at home, away from the overwhelming crowds. One day, she comes home with her head in the clouds, enamored with the boy Emil who gave her fruit in exchange for a lock of her hair. She's in love, and planning her future with him, but slowly falls ill. Only his fruit can revive her, and when Lizzie discovers that Emil is masquerading as a zduzse out to claim Minka as his own, she will stop at nothing to save her.
GOBLIN MARKET is about the bonds of sisterhood and the lengths we go for love. Minka has synesthesia, and it is hinted at that she make be autistic as well. Crowds overwhelm her, as do interacting with strangers and touching others. But Lizzie must overcome the things that hinder her if she wants to find out more about the mysterious Emil and find a way to save her sister. While none of the characters in the novel are overly developed, I love that Lizzie, as our main character, is fleshed out so fully by these defining characteristics. Her synesthesia is mentioned early on, and becomes a huge help in her quest later in the novel. Synesthesia is utilized in a really intriguing fashion that will absolutely intrigue young readers.
This is also a perfect fall read -- it is just the right amount of spooky! Younger readers will get the creeps a couple of times as they read, and be drawn further in to the dark side of the Goblin Market as Zahler creates an eerie atmosphere and lures them into the world of the zduzses. The creepy cover with its blood-red twins, shadowy villain, and disturbing creatures in the background heighten the mood and make this an instant Must Read this fall!
EXCERPT
Chapter 1
Market day was Lizzie’s favorite day of the week.
Not because she loved going to the market—the few times she’d been there, she’d hated it. There were so many people she didn’t know, from villages and farms clear on the other side of Elza. So much noise, such constant comings and goings, so many smells and colors! It was overwhelming, terrifying. Each time she’d ended up hiding in a doorway at the edge of the square, trembling, until Mother and Minka came to find her.
Now Minka went to market on her own.
Mother was delighted that Minka was old enough to go alone: she could stay home and attend to the chores. And Lizzie was delighted that she could steal into the Wood for an hour or two when she was done helping Father in the fields.
In the Wood, Lizzie always went to the same place, a little stand of birch trees beside a trickling stream. If it was warm and the sun shone down onto the circle of grass inside the grove, she would lie and look up at the sky. She could feel the breath of the Wood as the wind rustled the birch leaves. She could hear the Wood’s chuckle in the water running over rocks. Sometimes she felt as if the Wood’s heart thrummed inside her body. Her own pulse matched the Wood’s, beat for beat.
If it was cold, she would wrap up in her shawl and walk to stay warm, just listening—to bird songs, to the creak of branches rubbing together, to the rustle of rabbits and squirrels in the underbrush.
For Lizzie, each sound was a color. When she was younger, seven or eight, she’d sat at the kitchen table and tried to paint what she heard, but Minka laughed and pointed at her painted trees, saying, “Leaves aren’t gray, silly! And those don’t even look like trees. They look like sticks with clouds on top.” Minka loved to paint. She did it whenever she had a few minutes free of chores, and sometimes instead of chores. She mostly used watercolors, but if she had a few extra coppers, she would go into Elza and buy a tube of oil paint—cerulean blue, or chartreuse, or violet—and paint the whitewashed walls of the cottage with flowers and intricate designs, inside and out. Her lips were always tinted blue or green because she chewed on her brushes when she thought about what to paint.
“We don’t have any silver paint,” Lizzie said. “I had to use gray.”
“Leaves aren’t silver, either,” Minka pointed out. “They’re green. Or red and orange in the autumn.” She took the paintbrush, dipped it, and in a few moments there was a tree on the paper, brown and green and almost as real as life.
“But the sound the leaves make is silver,” Lizzie protested. “In springtime, anyway.”
Minka rolled her eyes. “What does that even mean?” she asked. “The sound the leaves make is silver?”
“It’s the color they make when they rustle together,” Lizzie said. “When the breeze blows. You know, the wavery lines of silver?”
Minka’s face was blank.
“You don’t see that?” Lizzie was confused. The idea that other people didn’t see what she saw was new to her.
“You do see that? Actually see it?”
Excerpt from Goblin Market / Text copyright © 2022 by Diane Zahler.
Reproduced by permission from Holiday House Publishing, Inc.
All rights reserved.
O F F I C I A L I N F O:
One sister must save the other from a goblin prince in this rich, spooky, and delightfully dark fantasy!
"TERRIFICALLY TIMELESS. . . SPLENDID."—Shelf Awareness
Lizzie and Minka are sisters, but they’re nothing alike: Minka is outgoing and cheerful, while Lizzie is shy and sensitive. Nothing much ever happens in their sleepy village—there are fields to tend, clothes to mend, and weekly trips to the market, predictable as the turning of the seasons. Lizzie likes it that way. It’s safe. It’s comfortable. She hopes nothing will ever change.
But one day, Minka meets a boy. A boy who gives her a plum to eat.
He is charming. He is handsome. He tells her that she’s special. He tells her no one understands her like he does—not her parents, not her friends, not even Lizzie. He tells her she should come away with him, into the darkness, into the forest. . . .
Minka has been bewitched and ensnared by a zdusze—a goblin. His plum was poison, his words are poison, and strange things begin to happen. Trees bleed, winds howl, a terrible sickness descends on Minka, and deep in the woods, in a place beyond sunshine, beyond reality, a wedding table has been laid. . . .
To save her sister, Lizzie will have to find courage she never knew she had—courage to confront the impossible—and enter into a world of dreams, danger, and death.
Rich world-building inspired by both Polish folklore and the poetry of Christina Rossetti combines with a tender sister story in this thrilling novel from Diane Zahler.
"Lush. . . Dreamy. . . Breath-quickening."—The Horn Book
"Resonates with emotion."—BCCB "Believably wrought."—Publishers Weekly
"Will entice readers looking for some chills."—Kirkus Reviews
Visit her website at www.dianezahler.com.
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