Just Jennifer

The Wildalone by Krassi Zourkova (William Morrow, January 2015)

Thea Slavin has left her family and native Bulgaria to study piano at Princeton University.  Upon arriving there, she learns she had a sister, Elza, who also attended Princeton fifteen years earlier but died as a freshman under mysterious circumstances, her body disappearing from the funeral home before her parents were able to claim their daughter.  Thea becomes almost as obsessed with the death and disappearance of her sister as she is with her piano lessons but just as quickly becomes by the Estlin brothers, unaware at first that there are two men, but both of whom have become fixated on Thea, the older, Rhys, more so, though the closer the pair gets, the further he holds her back.  As Thea learns more of the mythical world inhabited by Samodiv or Wildalones, she becomes more caught up in her own family’s story, a story from which she may never be able to escape.   This debut is full of Greek mythology, including a professor who was obsessed with Elza’s theories about a vase, Bulgarian folk lore, mysterious, wealthy, seductive strangers and a young woman struggling to reconcile a past she never knew with the future for which she is hoping.  Part fantasy, part romance, this debut novel is smart and full of mythology, Ancient Greek History and Bulgarian folk tales and is entirely captivating and engrossing.