The Spirit Bares Its Teeth

Mors vincit omnia. Death conquers all. London, 1883. The Veil between the living and dead has thinned. Violet-eyed mediums commune with spirits under the watchful eye of the Royal Speaker Society, and sixteen-year-old Silas Bell would rather rip out his violet eyes than become an obedient Speaker wife.

According to Mother, he'll be married by the end of the year. It doesn't matter that he's needed a decade of tutors to hide his autism; that he practices surgery on slaughtered pigs; that he is a boy, not the girl the world insists on seeing.

After a failed attempt to escape an arranged marriage, Silas is diagnosed with Veil sickness a mysterious disease sending violet-eyed women into madness-and shipped away to Braxton's Sanitorium and Finishing School. The facility is cold, the instructors merciless, and the students either bloom into eligible wives or disappear.

So when the ghosts of missing students start begging Silas for help, he decides to reach into Braxton's innards and expose its rotten guts to the world-as long as the school doesn't break him first.

Redefines the concept of a 'visceral' book. . . . parallels to the dangerous pressure to conform (especially for trans or autistic teens) and the importance of being seen and understood are masterfully shown. . . . readers, take care.-Booklist, Starred Review; White wields prose like a scalpel, cutting deep and spilling guts with gruesome precision. . . . Visceral and vindicating.-Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review; Via precise, intentional prose, White (Hell Followed with Us) crafts an unsettlingly horrific tale that boasts a rich and fully realized world, propelled by a champion of a protagonist whose determination to fight for his right to survive is both uplifting and empowering.-Publishers Weekly, Starred Review; [A] riveting, spellbinding Victorian horror about a neurodivergent trans boy desperate to escape the life his family has planned for him. . . . White shows in this sharp, tense novel the same kind of visceral prose that garnered such acclaim for his debut, Hell Followed with Us.-Shelf Awareness, Starred Review; White brings such raw agony, power, and desperation to his complex and layered characters that it is impossible to not feel immediately sympathetic and deeply invested in their survival.-The Bulletin for the Center of Children's Books, Starred Review

Andrew Joseph White is a trans, autistic author from Virginia, where he grew up falling in love with monsters and wishing he could be one too. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from George Mason University in 2022, and is the author of several bestselling novels about queer and disabled rage. Andrew tweets @AJWhiteAuthor.

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