Lucas has spent every summer since he was 10 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The son of a hated gringo hotel developer and a Puerto Rican mother who left when he was small, he is unpopular at best, except with a small group of local boys he’s been friends with from childhood. For years, people in the town have told stories about the house at the end of Calle Sol. It’s always shuttered, surrounded by a wall, and everyone says it’s been cursed. Still, there’s a tradition of people throwing little bits of paper over the wall with their wishes written on them. When Lucas’s love interest, Marisol, does this, she disappears soon after, washing ashore a few days later. And she isn’t the first girl to have gone missing and later been found dead. Then a small slip of paper with one of Lucas’s long- ago wishes shows up by his bedside. Lucas’s curiosity gets the better of him and he jumps over the wall. What he finds there is Isabel, a girl whose very touch is deadly. Mysterious, dangerous, disturbing, and deeply intoxicating, Isabel has been keeper of all the wishes. And she—or someone on the other side of that wall—also may, or may not, be behind the disappearances of young women and girls. In a superb debut novel, Mabry explores myth, heroism, identity, and loss through magical realism. (Age 14 and older)

In this stunning debut, legends collide with reality when a boy is swept into the magical, dangerous world of a girl filled with poison.
 
Everyone knows the legends about the cursed girl--Isabel, the one the senoras whisper about. They say she has green skin and grass for hair, and she feeds on the poisonous plants that fill her family’s Caribbean island garden. Some say she can grant wishes; some say her touch can kill.

Seventeen-year-old Lucas lives on the mainland most of the year but spends summers with his hotel-developer father in Puerto Rico. He’s grown up hearing stories about the cursed girl, and he wants to believe in Isabel and her magic. When letters from Isabel begin mysteriously appearing in his room the same day his new girlfriend disappears, Lucas turns to Isabel for answers--and finds himself lured into her strange and enchanted world. But time is running out for the girl filled with poison, and the more entangled Lucas becomes with Isabel, the less certain he is of escaping with his own life.

A Fierce and Subtle Poison beautifully blends magical realism with a page-turning mystery and a dark,  starcrossed romance--all delivered in lush, urgent prose.

“A breathtaking story in which myths come to frightening life and buried wishes might actually come true. This is a hypnotic debut by a remarkable talent.” —Nova Ren Suma, author of The Walls Around Us and Imaginary Girls