High on a forested mountain in Transylvania, practical sixteen-year-old Jenica and her four sisters live with their merchant father in the mouldering castle of Piscul Dracului. For nine years on each full moon, Jenica and her sisters have stolen away through a portal they discovered in their bedcham ber to dance through the night in the Other Kingdom, a place of magical creatures and faerie folk. But when Jenica’s older sister falls in love on a moonlit night with a silent man who may be one of the Night People, a drinker of blood, the sisters’ idyll is threatened. Steeped in folktales of danc ing princesses and enchanted frogs, the story nonetheless evokes a solid sense of place through the author’s attention to Romanian foods, traditions, and even a pronunciation guide for names and terms. A sequel, Cybele’s Secret (2008), follows the fourth sister. 2008 USBBY Outstanding International Books List, 2006 Winner of the Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Novel, 2009 Winner of the Beehive Book Award (Utah), 2007 Bank Street College of Education Best Children’s Books of the Year, 2007 YALSA Best Book for Young Adults. nlr

Originally published by Pan Macmillan Australia, in 2006.