The Demon's Lexicon

About The Demon's Lexicon

Nick and Alan Ryves have spent their whole lives running from the magicians who killed their father and want their mother dead too, surviving on stolen magic, con-artist charm, and Nick's willingness to use a knife first and ask questions never. When a strange boy and his sister turn up at their door hunted by the same magicians, Nick and Alan reluctantly take them in -- and Nick starts to realize how much his older brother Alan has been keeping from him about their family, their mother's sanity, and the demon mark Nick has carried since birth. Sarah Rees Brennan's debut trilogy inverts the usual YA fantasy setup: Nick, the series' narrator for book one, is less a chosen-one hero than a coldly practical fighter who doesn't understand emotions other people take for granted, which becomes the trilogy's central mystery in itself.

The trilogy widens its cast and shifts perspective across its three books -- The Demon's Lexicon (2009) is told from Nick's point of view, The Demon's Covenant (2010) shifts to Mae Crawford (the strange boy's sister), and The Demon's Surrender (2011) closes the story through Sin, a dancer in the magicians' rival circle. That structural trick lets Brennan complicate the reader's read on Nick book by book, revealing how differently he looks from the outside versus from within his own unnervingly literal head. Sharp, fast, and often very funny despite the body count, the trilogy was a Carnegie Medal nominee and established Brennan's voice: brutal magic system, quippy dialogue, and family loyalty pushed to its breaking point.