THE ANTIDOTE

Shelley Sackier spins a lush fantasy novel in the vein of Leigh Bardugo featuring a young healer's apprentice grappling with forbidden powers who must thwart a plot to kill her best friend, the prince.

In the world of healers, there is no room for magic. There is only knowledge precious wisdom, painstaking accounts of herbal remedies and long-practiced techniques handed down from healer to apprentice since the beginning of time. Fee knows this, just as certainly as she knows that her magic must be kept secret.

But the crown prince Xavi, Fee's best friend and only source of comfort, is sick. So sick, and so frustratingly incurable, that Fee can barely contain the magic lying dormant inside her. She could use it, just a little, to heal him. But magic comes at a deadly cost and attracts those who would seek to snuff it out forever.

Soon Fee is caught in a whirl of secret motivations and dark pasts, where no one is who or what they appear to be. And saving her best friend means delving deeper into the lush and treacherous world whose call she has long resisted and uncovering a secret that will change everything.


Shelley Sackier is the author of Dear Opl and The Freemason's Daughter. She blogs at ShelleySackier.com about food, family and the folly that is life while living atop a mountain in the Blue Ridge. She also gives school presentations to illuminate the merits of embracing failure (just like NASA) and to further her campaign to erect monuments to all librarians.