Lily the Silent

“Look inside this world and find wonder.” —KATE BERNHEIMER, editor of My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me and author of The Girl Who Wouldn’t Brush Her Hair

Lily leads a serene life in Arcadia until the forces of Megalopolis invade. Rescued from slavery by a prince of Megalopolis, Lily is sent to retrieve a very important key. Aided by her friends, her dog Rex, and even Death herself, Lily’s adventures take her from the Moons to the Bottom of the Sea, and finally back to Megalopolis, where she faces the decision of her life. Will she choose True Love and relinquish the key to those in Power or will she risk everything for who she is and return the key to Arcadia?

Narrated by Lily’s daughter, Sophia the Wise, this is a story about a girl who learns to live by her own light and—no matter how reluctantly—become the queen her people need. Full of Arcadian legends, it is also a fairy tale within a fairy tale about a troubled world not unlike our own, as well as a beautifully illustrated sequel to Snotty Saves the Day, which critics and booksellers hailed as “Lewis Carroll with footnotes by Jonathan Swift,” while comparing it to authors whose work can be savored by readers of all ages: Susanna Clark, C.S. Lewis, George Orwell, and L. Frank Baum.

The History of Arcadia series tells the story of a world that was literally formed by a story, by one person discovering and claiming who she really is . . . and of the subsequent events that led first to a deceptively happy world, then to an inevitably tragic outcome, and finally to a slow rebuilding of the world on foundations more deeply and thoughtfully laid. Each book includes bonus Arcadian legends and fairy tales, and relates how the manuscript crossed the barriers between Arcadia and our own world to arrive at Exterminating Angel Press. The first two novels in the series are Snotty Saves the Day and Lily the Silent.

Tod Davies lives with her husband and her two dogs at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, in Boulder, Colorado and in the alpine valley of Colestin, Oregon, where she discovered Snotty Saves the Day, the first Arcadian manuscript.

Illustrator Mike Madrid is the author of Vixens, Vamps & Vipers: Lost Villainesses of Golden Age Comics; Divas, Dames & Daredevils: Lost Heroines of Golden Age Comics, and The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines.

Author Biography

Tod Davies is the author of Snotty Saves the Day and Lily the Silent, both from The History of Arcadia series, and the cooking memoirs Jam Today: A Diary of Cooking With What You’ve Got and Jam Today Too: The Revolution Will Not Be Catered. Unsurprisingly, her attitude toward literature is the same as her attitude toward cooking—it’s all about working with what you have to find new ways of looking and new ways of being, and in doing so, to rediscover the best of our humanity. Davies lives with her husband and their two dogs, in the alpine valley of Colestin, Oregon, and at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, in Boulder, Colorado.