Religious Fantasy

Thirteen-year-old Kyra has grown up in an isolated polygamous community without questioning her father's three wives and her twenty brothers and sisters. Or at least without questioning them much—if you don't count her secret visits to the Mobile Library on Wheels to read forbidden books, or her meetings with the boy she hopes to choose for herself instead of having a man chosen for her. But when the Prophet decrees that Kyra must marry her 60-year-old uncle—who already has six wives—Kyra must make a desperate choice in the face of violence and her own fears of losing her family.

Anya and the Dragon is the story of fantasy and mayhem in 10th century Eastern Europe, where headstrong 11-year-old Anya is a daughter of the only Jewish family in her village. When her family's livelihood is threatened by a bigoted magistrate, Anya is lured in by a friendly family of fools, who promise her money in exchange for helping them capture the last dragon in Kievan Rus. This seems easy enough, until she finds out that the scary old dragon isn't as old - or as scary - as everyone thought. Now Anya is faced with a choice: save the dragon, or save her family.

As a slave in the war-weary kingdom of Faelen, 17-year-old Nym isn’t merely devoid of rights, her Elemental kind are only born male and always killed at birth - meaning, she shouldn’t even exist. Standing on the auction block beneath smoke-drenched mountains, Nym faces her 15th sell. But when her hood is removed and her storm-summoning killing curse revealed, Nym is snatched up by a court advisor and given a choice: be trained as the weapon Faelen needs to win the war or be killed.

Cantor D’Ahma waited his whole life for this day. Born with a gift to walk between worlds, the young realm walker is finally ready to leave his elderly mentor and accept his role as protector and defender of the realms. But mere hours after he steps through his first portal, Cantor discovers that his job will be more dangerous and difficult than he ever imagined. The realms are plagued with crime and cruelty, and even members of the once-noble Realm Walkers Guild can no longer be trusted.

Ellie is a 12-year-old orphan who desperately wants a family. She just doesn't expect to find one when she joins the crew of the Legend, a flying ship in a secret rescue fleet. On board, she meets a boy with a pet tarantula, a bully with eyes like mirrors, and a librarian who can read 18 languages. Unexpectedly, Ellie also discovers a powerful gift that only she can wield. But when the Legend is called to a dangerous rescue mission, Ellie risks losing everyone she loves. Will her mysterious gift be enough to save her and her friends from a deadly enemy bent on destroying their world?

Seeker's older sister, Moira, has dreams and longings in her heart about the future. Trapper and Fantasy convince her that only in the World Beyond the Kingdom will her dreams come true. But they have lied to Moira. She doesn't realize that the path she has chosen will end in the Valley of Lost Dreams. The Doorkeeper didn't stop the children with his usual question, do you really want to see the King? Instead, he quickly opened the door just in time for the army of children to race through. They slid down the shining hallway not for fun today, but just because it was faster.

We all know the story of Lazarus. Died and four days later resurrected by Jesus. The story you don't know is what happened during those four days in the grave. What happened to Lazarus after he rejoined the living? I'll tell you. When a person dies they become the prize of Azrael, the angel of death. Now, if that prize is taken from him he doesn't take that too kindly. The people that witnessed the miracle of resurrection in that small town of Bethany started to believe in Jesus, and the Pharisee priests could not allow that to happen.

Carrying a sealed message from the war-hero Dragon King to the queen, Quentin and his outlaw companion, Theido, plunge headlong into a fantastic odyssey and mystic quest. Danger lurks everywhere in the brutal terrain, and particularly in the threats from merciless creatures, both human and not-so-human. While at the castle, the wicked Prince Jaspin schemes to secure the crown for himself, and an evil sorcerer concocts his own monstrous plan. A plan that Quentin and Theido could never imagine.

Rapunzel can throw a knife better than any man. She paints beautiful flowering vines on the walls of her plaster houses. She sings so sweetly, she can coax even a beast to sleep. But there are two things she is afraid her mother might never allow her to do: learn to read and marry. Fiercely devoted to Rapunzel, her mother is suspicious of every man who so much as looks at her daughter and warns her that no man can be trusted.

Thalli has 15 minutes and 23 seconds to live. The toxic gas that will complete her annihilation is invading her bloodstream. But she is not afraid. Decades before Thalli's birth, the world was decimated by a nuclear war. But life continued deep underground, thanks to a handful of scientists known as The Ten. There they created genetically engineered human beings who are free of emotions in the hope that war won't threaten the world again.

Some doors are better left unopened. Some doors, you don’t want to find out what lies behind them. In the Forbidden Doors series by best-selling author Bill Myers, teenager Rebecca “Becka” Williams, her younger brother, Scott, and her friend, Ryan Riordan, are swept into heart-stopping encounters with an all-too-real invisible world - a world fraught with deception and spiritual adversaries that promise goodness and enlightenment but will stop at nothing to destroy life, sanity, and human souls. Witchcraft. Reincarnation. Ouija Boards. UFOs. Shamanism.

The Dragon King who rules the land of Mensandor is none other than Quentin, whose courage and heroism have slowly transformed him from an orphaned servant into a war hero, respected leader and a fierce man of faith. But even the powerful can fall prey to weakness. The world is turned upside-down when the dark sorcerer Nimrood - long thought dead after a battle with the previous Dragon King - returns with a fearsome plan.

One of the chosen has gone renegade. Turning his back on all that he once believed, Billos does the forbidden and enters into a Book of History. He lands in a reality as foreign to him as water is to oil - a place called Paradise, Colorado. He has strange new powers given to him courtesy of a mysterious figure known as Marsuvees Black. The chosen four have survived the desert, escaped the Black Forest, battled the Horde, and added a spirited refugee to their number. But nothing has prepared them for the showdown that Billos, the renegade, is luring them into.

At the heart of Tolkienian fantasy is "recovery," a "cleaning of the windows" of our perception that we may learn to see the world again in all its strange beauty. And, for Tolkien, to recover the world anew is to recover a sense of the world as a meaningful act of creation by a living and loving Creator. How does Tolkien accomplish this? Through "sub-creation" or mythopoeia, the "fashioning of myth." For it is in creating an imaginary world ourselves through poetry, fairy-story, and myth that we come to "see" our "primary world" as itself an act of creation.

Finn and Ezra don’t have a lot in common—except, of course, that they’re trapped in a bar mitzvah time loop, reliving their celebrations in the same New Jersey hotel over and over and over again. Not ideal, particularly when both kids were ready for their bar mitzvahs to end the moment they began. Ezra comes from a big family—four siblings, all seeming to get more attention than him, even on his bar mitzvah weekend. Finn is an only child who’s tired of his parents’ constant focus, even worse on his bar mitzvah weekend.

All lies have consequences. Promoted to the top rank among King Respen's assassins, First Blade Leith Torren hides his involvement with the Resistance. How many lies will it take to protect his secret? When the unthinkable happens, faith waivers. Friendships tear. What else will they be forced to deny? But this time, Leith faces his greatest fear. He can't save everyone.

In publishing-speak, here's what we at the LQ office sometimes describe as the Queer lovechild of Sholem Aleichem and Philip Roth: Uriel the angel and Little Ash (short for Ashmedai) are the only two supernatural creatures in their shtetl (which is so tiny, it doesn't have a name other than Shtetl). The angel and the demon have been studying together for centuries, but pogroms and the search for a new life have drawn all the young people from their village to America. When one of those young emigrants goes missing, Uriel and Little Ash set off to find her.

Goel, their spiritual leader, has sent the Seven Sleepers on yet another adventure. The Dark Lord is threatening the Kingdom of Camelot, and Joshua Adams and his six companions seek to aid the king in fighting off the invaders. Bob Lee Jackson, "Reb" to his friends, finds himself a key player in this frightening game. Having become expert with shield and sword, Reb takes the fate of the kingdom upon his shoulders. But the situation grows grim as the physical dangers make way for spiritual dangers. The Sleepers must call upon the power of Goel to combat the servants of the Dark Lord.

A daring rescue. A difficult choice. Sophie desperately wants to get away from her stepmother's jealousy and believes escape is her only chance to be happy. Then a young man named Gabe arrives from Hagenheim Castle, claiming she is betrothed to his older brother, and everything twists upside down. This could be Sophie's one chance at freedom - but can she trust another person to keep her safe?

The angel Bethany and her mortal love, Xavier, have already pushed the boundaries of Heaven with their relationship. In this conclusion to the Halo trilogy, the two take their love to the next, forbidden, step: They marry. At a time when they believe nothing will come between them again, they are faced with their most daunting challenge yet: the Sevens, a military order of angels designed to maintain balance in the universe. These soldiers won’t stop until their job is done - capture the wayward angel and send her home.