From award-winning, New York Times bestselling author Kelly Barnhill comes a stunning collection of nine stories teeming with uncanny characters whose lives unfold in worlds at once strikingly human and eerily original.
When Mrs. Sorensen's husband dies, she rekindles a long-dormant love with an unsuitable mate in "Mrs. Sorensen and the Sasquatch." In "Open the Door and the Light Pours Through," a young man wrestles with grief and his sexuality in an exchange of letters with his faraway beloved. "Dreadful Young Ladies" demonstrates the strength and power—known and unknown—of the imagination. The World Fantasy Award–winning novella The Unlicensed Magician introduces the secret, magical life of an invisible girl once left for dead.
By an author hailed as "a fantasist on the order of Neil Gaiman" (Minneapolis Star Tribune), the stories in Dreadful Young Ladies feature bold, reality-bending fantasy underscored by rich universal themes of love, death, jealousy, and hope.
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“The eight short stories and one novella in Newbery Medalist Barnhill’s collection are haunting and beautifully told…Each story is written in intensely poetic language that can exult or disturb, sometimes within the same sentence, and evokes a dreamlike, enchanted mood that lingers in the reader’s mind. These tales are made to be reread and savored.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Featuring elements of magic realism while touching on the themes of love, grief, hope, jealousy, and more…[A] spellbinding collection.”
— Booklist“Reminiscent of Ray Bradbury or Angela Carter…Whether Barnhill’s settings are contemporary, historical, or dystopian, she mixes the feeling of fairy tales with the psychological preoccupations of literary fiction.”
— Kirkus ReviewsBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Kelly Barnhill is the author of four novels, including The Girl Who Drank the Moon, winner of the 2017 John Newbery Medal for the year’s most distinguished contribution to American literature for children. She is also the winner of the World Fantasy Award, the Parents’ Choice Gold Award, and the Texas Library Association Bluebonnet Award and has been a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award, the NCTE Charlotte Huck Award, the SFWA Andre Norton Award, and the PEN/USA literary prize.
John Lee is the winner of numerous Earphones Awards and the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration. He has twice won acclaim as AudioFile’s Best Voice in Fiction & Classics. He also narrates video games, does voice-over work, and writes plays. He is an accomplished stage actor and has written and coproduced the feature films Breathing Hard and Forfeit. He played Alydon in the 1963–64 Doctor Who serial The Daleks.