Book #102 -- Nancy Werlin, Impossible, 375 pages.

A wonderful, fascinating book that centres around the song "Scarborough Fair" and its predecessor, Child Ballad #2, "The Elfin Knight". Lucy Scarborough is seventeen, and a junior in high school. And if it bothers her sometimes to see the crazy bag lady who is her birth mother wandering around town, at least she has a wonderful foster family, excellent friends, and her own bright future. But when she finds herself pregnant after a horrible attack on prom night, she starts to discover that there is more to her family history than she has ever known. The Scarborough girls are victims of a powerful curse, and if Lucy doesn't complete three impossible tasks by the time her daughter is born, she is destined, like her mother, to madness at the hands of a sinister supernatural knight, who will stop at nothing to make her his. But unlike the Scarborough women who came before her, Lucy has a loving family to help her, and love discovered in the most unexpected of places. Will it be enough to protect her and her unborn child from the curse?
I stopped at the Penguin booth several times trying to get ahold of one of their limited ARCs of this book at ALA. And it was every bit as good as I could have hoped. I have always loved novels based on fairy tales and ballads, and this one has just the right blend of sweet romance and menacing supernatural forces. I'm really glad I was able to get this one. I'll have to add it to the books I'm annotating for my book on retold fairy tales, which I'm thinking of extending to include books that are retellings of traditional ballad such as Tam Lin and The Elfin Knight, since they are a similar form of literature. And this one is definitely worthy of inclusion.

Progress toward goals: 285/366 = 77.9%

Books: 102/150 = 68.0%

Pages: 27078/50000 = 54.2%

2008 Book List

cross-posted to 15000pages, 50bookchallenge, and gwynraven