Damned Pretty Things

Fortune is an itinerant musician without a past who braids memories into her hair. Maud is a sheltered small-town girl and an unwitting heir to the notorious McBride family magic. The two young women meet when Fortune is commissioned to bring Maud to a rich man whose grandson she cursed. United by their love of music and their hunger for the road, Fortune and Maud form a friendship one that is threatened not only by Fortune's mission but also by their mutual desire for a man called Lightning.

''Sweet as vanishing dreams, tender to the touch as new memories, wise as nursery rhymes, tasty as blueberry pancakes, Holly Wade Matter's Damned Pretty Things is a wondrous redemption tale of the triumph of love and friendship over pain and difference.--Nisi Shawl, author of Everfair and Filter House

Damned Pretty Things is beautiful and wise, haunted and haunting. Sui generis. Brilliant. Enjoy.--Cynthia Ward, author of the Blood-Thirsty Agent series

Holly Wade Matter's short fiction has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, Century, and the Bending the Landscape anthology series. She is a graduate of the University of Washington and of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. She has twice been awarded literary funding from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, and in 1998 she received a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Seattle with her husband Brad and two house rabbits. Damned Pretty Things is her first novel.