THE WAKING FOREST

An older teen’s uncanny dreams spill into reality—or perhaps it’s the other way around.

Rhea Ravenna, eldest of four white sisters, has been having visions and the same dream full of winding stairs and forbidden doors since she was young. Now 18 and with a decade of therapy for anxiety under her belt, she finally opens the door in her dream to find a dark presence behind it—and he is still there when she wakes up. Elsewhere in a vast woods—the same woods that Rhea sees in waking visions—a witch contentedly grants wishes to dreaming children, until a young man disguised as a black fox enters her realm and begins to tell her an enigmatic story of magic and rebellion and torn-out hearts. As Rhea’s home begins to unravel and her family to disappear, her world and the witch’s realm violently collide, and neither can hold back their screams. Dreams and stories—their power to escape reality and to restore it—are in the bones of this masterfully woven fantasy debut. And at its heart? The power of revolution in the face of coldly violent injustice. Wees has borrowed everything and nothing at all from fairy tales, stitching the most timeless and archetypal elements of dream, darkness, the forest, corruption, and imperfect valor into an intricate pattern crafted to twist, invert, and fall apart with exquisite precision.

Into the woods like never before.