Fiercely original and uncommonly lovely, The Witch's Boy is equal parts enchanting and haunting. Kelly Barnhill is master of truly potent and unruly magic; luckily for readers, she chooses to use her powers for good.

She'd read once that if you ran into a bear in the woods you should avoid eye contact and you shouldn't run away, but all she knew about wolves is that you should never tell them how to find your grandmother's house.

Sometimes superheroes are born, sometimes they are made. Sometimes they make themselves. Sometimes all it takes is will.

This is what it is to live in the world. You have to give yourself over to the cold, at least a little bit.

It snowed right before Jack stopped talking to Hazel, fluffy white flakes big enough to show their crystal architecture, like perfect geometric poems.

She understood. They were plastic flowers of words—but they looked nice on the surface.

Now, the world is more than it seems to be. You know this, of course, because you read stories. You understand that there is the surface and then there are all the things that glimmer and shift underneath it. And you know that not everyone believes in those things, that there are people—a great many people—who believe the world cannot be any more than what they can see with their eyes. But we know better.