At the same time, she had to believe with all that she had seen and was faced with even though it was so preposterous. Good publisher + genre I like = a great book. I loved that the main character, Selkie, definitely had a tough time wrapping her head around what she found out and who she was just like any seventeen-year-old girl would. This definitely was the case with The Girl Who Never Was. There is just something about the real world mixing with a fantastical one that has a magical quality to it while also feeling like it could happen. I have had fairly good luck with this publisher. Does her mother really wish to kill her? Would Will sacrifice her for the sake of the prophecy? And does Ben really love her or is it all an elaborate ruse? In order to survive, Selkie realizes that the key is learning-and accepting-who she really is. But in a supernatural world of increasingly complex alliances and distressingly complicated deceptions, it’s so hard to know who to trust. Now, with enchantments dissolved and prophecies swinging into action, Selkie finds herself on a series of mad quests to save the people she’s always loved and a life she’s learning to love. Because the boy she thinks she’s in love with turns out to be a faerie whose enchantment has kept her alive, but also kept her in the dark about her own life. Selkie has been kept hidden all her life by her adoring aunts, with the help of a Salem wizard named Will. Even more confusing, there’s a prophecy that Selkie is going to destroy the tyrannical Seelie Court, which is why her mother actually wants to kill her. It turns out that her mother is faerie royalty, which would make Selkie a faerie princess-except for the part where her father is an ogre, which makes her only half of anything. When Selkie goes in search of the mother she’s never known, she gets more than she bargained for. But other than that her life is totally normal! She’s got an adventurous best friend who’s always got her back and an unrequited crush on an older boy named Ben. Sure, her father is in an insane asylum, her mother left her on his doorstep-literally-when she was a baby, and she’s being raised by two ancient aunts who spend their time hunting gnomes in their Beacon Hill townhouse. THE GIRL WHO NEVER WAS is the story of Selkie Stewart, who thinks she’s a totally normal teenager growing up in Boston.

The Girl Who Never Was by Skylar Dorset