In her small town, sixteen-year-old Isola Wilde is known for being weird: her rainbow hair and vintage Gothic fashions don’t exactly blend in. The nuns at school cross themselves when she passes; other students laugh at her behind her back. At home, her father swings between fits of rage and stony silence, while her withdrawn, depressed mother spends entire days in the bath. But Isola lives with one foot in a magical world that most people can’t see. She walks to school through an enchanted forest and counts among her closest friends a faery, a mermaid, a Fury, and the ghost of a Victorian dandy. When a vengeful dead girl begins haunting Isola and her friends, they must solve a mystery straight out of one of Isola’s beloved fairy tales.

There is a lot going on here, and the novel sometimes struggles under the weight of its own ideas. Not every fantastical subplot seems necessary, and not every loose end is tied up. The prose is histrionic even for Young Adult fantasy; sentences are filled with self-consciously precious similes and metaphors. But when it works, it works beautifully. Near obviously has a deep understanding and love of fairy tales; although the tales referenced in this book are her own inventions, they embody all the wonder and enchantment as well as the gore and darkness of traditional fairy tales in their earliest, pre-sanitised incarnations.

Too often, speculative fiction sweeps the reader along with a flashy plot while neglecting characterisation. Refreshingly, that isn’tthe case here: the major characters – human and otherwise – are multifaceted and compelling. At twenty-three, Near is a talent to watch.