Dark Library

Marah Levi is a promising violinist who excels at school and can read more languages than most librarians. Even so, she has little hope of a bright future: she is a sparker, a member of the oppressed lower class in a society run by magicians. Then a mysterious disease hits the city of Ashara, turning its victims' eyes dark before ultimately killing them. As Marah watches those whom she loves most fall ill, she finds an unlikely friend in Azariah, a wealthy magician boy.

Sixteen-year-old sisters Samira and Rima aren't exactly living the dream. Instead, they live with their maddeningly unreliable mother in a rundown trailer in Michigan. Dad's dead, money's tight, and Mom disappears for days at a time. So when Sam's grandfather wills her the family valuables - a cache of Lebanese antiquities - she's desperate enough to try pawning them before Mom can. But she shouldn't. Because one is cursed, forbidden, the burial coin of a forgotten god. Disturbing it condemns her and Rima to the Phoenician underworld.

Her life is overdue, and tonight she has to pay. Rachel Dankworth finds her name on a library due date card. The fine? Her entire existence. “You shouldn’t be alive,” the card whispers at midnight. “You stole someone else’s story.” Nineteen years ago, Rachel survived falling through ice when she should have died. Now the Emberwick Library has come to collect—with interest. Text crawls beneath her skin like living tattoos. Her body flickers transparent at the edges. She’s being erased, word by word, paragraph by paragraph. “You’re nineteen years overdue,” warns Dexter, ...