by Mary Shaffer | Inscape Books | Paperback, 374 pages | ISBN: 979-8-9986136-0-9
We can’t unchange. It’s the one thing we can’t do.
Wick and Arrow live in a cage in the boudoir of the Queen of the Giants and have never met any humans except each other. Then a wizard takes one of them away. As Arrow faces the world outside the cage without the boy who taught her to be human, her need for survival leads her to do something unthinkable: pretend he never existed.
For the next seven years, Arrow strives to become a normal human girl… until her facade goes up in flames. Finally confronting the impossible demands of an unbreakable love, she finds herself at the center of a game she and Wick have been calculated to lose since their birth. When love becomes a weapon, has it already been destroyed?
With echoes of “The Snow Queen,” this folkloric fantasy takes inspiration from the incisive storytelling of Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde. Like all good fairy tales, its disarmingly playful tone allows it to probe raw truths about the human heart: the loss and restoration of innocence, the cost of love, and our perennial longing to be fully known.
Coming August 4th!
“Wick,” said Arrow, “what if we are the only two humans left in the world?”
In 2017, I was on a silent retreat when I suddenly felt the story of Wick and Arrow. I didn’t know the characters or the plot yet… I just knew what it felt like to read this novel-length fairy tale for grown ups. It felt like reading the quirky, poignant, often bizarre tales that preceded the Tolkienian epic fantasy. It was not about a world-ending battle or a meticulous magic system. Inspired by Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Snow Queen,” it was about a boy and a girl who are best friends, and the magical things that happen to them because of their love.
As a theatre artist, I have a strong vision for tangible (touchable, seeable, smellable) embodiments of spiritual-intellectual encounters. The object of the book as a thing of beauty has always seemed to me a critical part of the experience of reading it. I chose to independently publish Wick and Arrow so I could artistically shape its design and printing. The stunning book design evokes the lushness of Art Nouveau fairytale collections. I hope to eventually follow the high-quality paperback with a deluxe hardcover edition!
—Mary Shaffer
“A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way…. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.”