Book Recommendations: The Cost of the Bargain

Two books landing this April from Page Street YA are doing something that goes past their gorgeous covers and their queer romances, though they have all of those things. The Labyrinth of Waking Dreams by Michelle Kulwicki releases April 21st and The Redwood Bargain by Markelle Grabo releases April 28th, and on the surface they are very different books. One is a portal fantasy in rural Appalachian West Virginia where a barn party turns into a monster massacre and three strangers end up fleeing into a sentient underworld full of creatures that want to kill them. The other is a gothic fairy tale retelling where an indentured servant agrees to impersonate a noblewoman for a murderous forest lord, because three women before her have already died trying and she intends to be the last. Different worlds, different centuries, different monsters.

But both are telling the same story underneath, and it is not really about the monsters.

They are stories about constrained choice. About what it looks like when every option available to you is bad, and you pick the least terrible one, and the people around you call it bravery because there is no better word for it. Thea, the protagonist of Labyrinth, is a high school dropout working multiple jobs in a town that does not have much to offer her. She did not choose the Labyrinth. She ended up there because something happened that she could not have prepared for and there was no other door. Katrien, the protagonist of Redwood Bargain, is an indentured servant who agrees to walk into a situation where three women have already been killed because the alternative is her cousin’s continued bondage and she cannot live with that. Neither of them is making a free choice. They are making the only move the board allows them.

A lot of people are living inside that exact question right now, watching systems make decisions about their lives that they had no say in.

The class thread in both books is also the engine. Thea’s working poverty shapes every risk she is willing to take. Katrien’s position in the household determines what she is allowed to want and how much her life is worth to the people with power over her. Both books are asking who gets sacrificed and who gets protected, and whether the people doing the protecting ever actually register what it costs. I keep thinking about that question outside the context of these books and finding it just as hard to answer.

The queer love in both is also constrained, and I do not think that is a coincidence either. Oliver in Labyrinth loves someone who cannot love him back openly, and his banishment from the order is the direct result of that love existing at all. Katrien falls for the woman she is pretending to be, which means falling for someone whose life she is borrowing and whose death she is trying to prevent. The romance exists inside a world where Katrien’s survival depends on a performance, and the person coaching her through it is the person she is falling for. The world each character lives in makes love into something that has to be survived, and that hits differently when queer existence is actively being legislated against in the actual world these books are being published into.

I am not saying either of these is allegory. I do not think that is what they are going for. But dark fantasy has always worked this way, holding something true about power and sacrifice and who the world decides matters, and putting it somewhere you can look at it directly because it is not technically real. The monster in the forest and the creature in the Labyrinth are doing what monsters in stories have always done.

They’re also both duology openers! There is a certain kind of story that keeps showing up right now and I do not think it is an accident…

The Labyrinth of Waking Dreams

by Michelle Kulwicki
Published by: Page Street YA
on April 21, 2026
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In this adventure-packed portal fantasy, three teens discover a gateway to a mythical Labyrinth in the Appalachian Mountains

Barren’s Peak, West Virginia, is not a place anyone would call magical, but Thea
LaGuerre calls it home. A high school drop-out whose mother died in an accident, Thea is stuck working part-time jobs just to make ends meet. The most she has to look forward to are barn parties where she can make out with Callum, the one interesting boy who moved to town six months ago.

Thea doesn’t know it yet, but Callum was sent to Barren’s Peak to watch her. He was raised within the magicians’ order, a shadowy organization meant to keep humanity safe from an underworld of monsters. Callum would sacrifice anyone, including himself, to help their cause, but he still can’t help falling into Thea’s orbit. She’s the first person he’s felt seen by since his childhood sweetheart, Oliver—who he hasn’t seen since Oliver’s banishment from the order.

But Oliver hasn’t given up on Callum or on magic. Following a magical creature’s trail to Barren’s Peak, Oliver happens upon Callum and Thea at a barn party that turns into a monster-overrun massacre. To save Callum and the girl he’s protecting from a wave of deadly fairies, Oliver opens a portal for the three of them to flee into the Labyrinth.

To get home again, Thea, Oliver, and Callum will have to work together to survive the Labyrinth’s trials and discover the threads that brought them there.

The Redwood Bargain

by Markelle Grabo
on April 28, 2026
Bookshop
Goodreads

To free her cousin from an indentured contract, Katrien agrees to fulfill their lord’s bargain with the fabled “Redwood Man.” Three maids before her have posed as his stepdaughter, Lady Zaviera, and met this lord of the forest as promised. But Katrien means to be the first to fool him—and live.
Impersonating a Lady is no easy feat, especially one as beautiful and aloof as Zaviera. With one month before she’s sent off, Katrien is put through endless lessons, even as the Redwood Man’s suffocating vines overtake the manor and threaten its staff.
Zaviera takes a special interest in her training, and their shared interests grow into shared affections. But the Redwood Man awaits his prize. Caught between duty and desire, her future and her past, Katrien must navigate a tricky bargain—or risk failing those she holds dearest.