The town quarantines, severed from the rest of the world.

The Quicksilver Blight, the strange sap that leaks from the ground, has turned animals and people into zombie-like creatures. Tourists come, and in flashbacks, we get a sense of how the town was once, and what it’s since become. It’s a lovely twist on the idea of magic being ethereal: instead, it’s carnal and physical. The magic turns sour in the Quicksilver Blight. I’m sure their taste is (literally) magical, too. There is magic in the soil-the crops are unnatural their effects, nothing short of supernatural. There are the ghost melons, which glow blue the rainbow wheat, which, when baked into unicorn braid bread, tastes like a variety of different fruits and vegetables, which are also Wren’s, the main character’s, family crop. Hollow’s End feels like a fully realized, all-American town with lots of farmland, familial pride, history, and strange fruit. This story is a one-and-done, a quick read. The format is refreshing, especially when most YA books are a series.

This story is constrained, clipped-and it works. There are other unsolved mysteries and questions-but they’re not distractions. It’s limited to one all-American town, Hollow’s End, a handful of key characters, one primary plot that the primary character needs to solve, and one major subplot (as well as smaller issues and character dynamics). What We Harvestby Ann Fraistat is, first and foremost, tight. “What good is a legacy if it’s always been a lie?”

What We Harvest by Ann Fraistat