Sarah Cross

True love’s kiss just may prove deadly....

Mirabelle’s past is shrouded in secrecy, from her parents’ tragic deaths to her guardians’ half-truths about why she can’t return to her birthplace, Beau Rivage. Desperate to see the town, Mira runs away a week before her sixteenth birthday—and discovers a world she never could have imagined.

In Beau Rivage, nothing is what it seems—the strangely pale girl with a morbid interest in apples, the obnoxious playboy who’s a beast to everyone he meets, and the chivalrous guy who has a thing for damsels in distress. Here, fairy tales come to life, curses are awakened, and ancient stories are played out again and again.

But fairy tales aren’t pretty things, and they don’t always end in happily ever after. Mira has a role to play, a fairy-tale destiny to embrace or resist. As she struggles to take control of her fate, Mira is drawn into the lives of two brothers with fairy-tale curses of their own ... brothers who share a dark secret. And she’ll find that love, just like fairy tales, can have sharp edges and hidden thorns.

Release date: April 10, 2012.

OTHER EDITIONS

An audio book version will be released by Listening Library.

Brazil edition forthcoming from Verus.

Portugal edition forthcoming from Planeta Manuscrito.

PRAISE

"Smart, romantic and inspired, Sarah Cross's Kill Me Softly is storytelling at its finest. She breathes new life into familiar tales, twisting them in fantastically unexpected ways. This book blew me away!" --Carrie Ryan, New York Times bestselling author of The Forest of Hands and Teeth series

"In a town cursed to be a fairy tale, things are changing: damsels are fighting to avoid distress and villains refusing their destiny. An escape from happily-ever-after that's equal parts romantic, tragic, funny and brilliant." --Sarah Rees Brennan, author of The Demon's Lexicon trilogy

"Not your vanilla retelling, Kill Me Softly combines the darkness of the original Brothers Grimm, a modern cast of characters, and just a twist of whimsy that makes the whole town of Beau Rivage feel so wrong. You know, the good kind of wrong." --Aprilynne Pike, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Wings