Featured author: Alisse Lee Goldeberg

A big welcome to today's featured author, Alisse Lee Goldenberg, who is an author of horror and young adult fantasy fiction. She has her bachelors of education and a fine arts degree, and has studied fantasy and folk lore since she was a child. Alisse lives in Toronto with her husband Brian, their triplets Joseph, Phillip, and Hailey, and their rambunctious Goldendoodle Sebastian.

Find Alisse on her website, and Twitter.

About The Dybbuk's Mirror: 
It has been nearly two years since the events in The Strings of the Violin, and Carrie has adjusted to life as a university student far from her friends. However, when the path to Hadariah is sealed, she starts to fear malevolent forces may be behind the other strange occurrences around her. Trying to contact Lindsay and Rebecca to get help in unraveling the mystery, Carrie discovers that her friends are in fact missing. With no way of knowing who to trust, Carrie must find a way back to the land she once saved to rescue her friends from the dybbuks’ clutches.

Reuniting with the dybbuk princess Emilia, and finding a new friend in the mysterious farmer Mikhail, Carrie must once again do battle with Asmodeus’s forces, and help stop the chaos that threatens to overtake the land while striving to save both Lindsay and Rebecca. For the first time, Carrie is working without the two friends who have helped her through every major decision in her life. Carrie must learn to rely on herself, and find her own strengths to save those she holds dear.

Genre classification: YA Fantasy

200-word excerpt from The Strings of the Violin

Carrie stared at the small collection of leaves. How could she possibly fit through that? She hesitated, and one of her hands sought her necklace. She gave a small shrug and got down on all fours. As she approached the bush she heard her dog barking hysterically from the house. “Bye, Finn,” she whispered and crawled forward. 

Was she shrinking? Was the bush getting larger? Whatever was happening, it was clearly magic. Carrie crawled onward. Branches and leaves caught in her hair, tore at her pack. The tunnel (for she was now sure there was a tunnel in that collection of twigs) seemed to go on forever. Carrie was keenly aware of everything around her. Her eyes sharply saw each leaf in stark detail, the way the light filtered through the holes in the foliage and dappled everything in a mossy green. She heard every breaking branch under her knees and hands with a sharp, resounding crack that seemed to stab the silence in the air around her. She felt their sharp ends scratch her hands through the velvety moss that carpeted the ground she crawled over. Her lungs breathed in the moist air—cleaner than the air of cities and suburbs. More real, more nourishing than anything she was used to. 

She smelled rain, grass, soil, devoid of all those man-made smells from home. The overabundance of oxygen made her head heavy; her heart felt as if it would burst.
Just as she thought she would never reach the end of her journey, she abruptly found her-self kneeling under a night sky, surrounded by a primeval forest, the likes of which she had never seen before. Carrie stood up on shaky legs, speechless, in another world.

Buy The Dybbuk's Mirror on Amazon or directly from Prizm Books.