Furthermore

About the Furthermore series

Alice Alexis Queensmeadow was born without any color at all in a village obsessed with it, and it's cost her — friendlessness, suspicion, a father who wandered into the magical, dangerous land of Furthermore years ago and never came home. When Alice sets off to find him, dragging along a reluctant, secretive boy named Oliver who has his own reasons for the journey, Tahereh Mafi builds a Wonderland-adjacent world where colors have their own moods and dangers, where the rules of reality bend on a whim, and where growing up means learning which parts of a fairy tale you can actually trust. It's a sharp turn for Mafi — from the fevered, adult-leaning intensity of Shatter Me into something playful, strange and aimed at younger readers, though her taste for interior, image-heavy prose carries over intact.

Whichwood, the second book, shifts focus to Laylee, a supporting character from Furthermore, and the crushing responsibility she's carried alone since her mother's death: washing and preparing the bodies of the dead so their souls can pass on, in a village that has stopped paying her, feeding her, or even seeing her as a person rather than a function. Both books share a setting and a handful of characters but tell largely self-contained stories, each built around a young protagonist nearly buried by an impossible burden nobody else will help carry.