Fly by Night by Frances Hardinge is a YA novel about Mosca Mye, a girl who escapes her desolate life in a village where she is treated with suspicion because of a dangerous skill: knowing how to read. Her flight gets her tangled up with a disreputable Eponymous Clent with whom she travels to the city of Mandelion. There they engage in acts of conspiracy and espionage as rival guilds wage a war of dominance within the kingdom called the Fractured Realm.

How much do I find it amusing that Mosca helped free Eponymous Clent from the village stockade because he’s a poet who uses words like “mellifluous?” He blinded her with science! words. I love that this is a dominant part of Mosca’s personality, that she gets into these dangerous situations because she is seduced by words, the texture and the sound of them.

Read more.