The Blood Confession »

Alisa M. Libby lives outside of Boston, Massachusetts.

Erzebet is young, beautiful, rich, and imprisoned in her castle, waiting to be sentenced for murder. In a brilliant fiction debut, Alisa M. Libby resurrects the real-life Erzebet Bathory, a seventeenth-century countess who believed that bathing in human blood would preserve her looks forever. The jailed countess tells her story from her birth, which was overshadowed by a bad omen, to her mother's mental deterioration, Erzebet's own love for a mysterious figure, and the crimes she committed in pursuit of eternal life.

This gripping novel combines gothic horror and romance as it explores the connection between beauty and power.

VOYA

Erzebet, daughter of Count Bizecka, was born under a cursed omen. A star fell the night she was born, marking her out as a child who would die young or live forever. From childhood she is desperate not to age and lose the beauty that is her most praised attribute. With the help of a mysterious stranger, she discovers that blood can hold the secrets of eternal youth. At first, she only takes a little blood from willing servant girls, but her hunger for power grows until she is bathing in the blood of her murder victims. This gothic novel, set in sixteenth-century Hungary, is a young woman's dark search for power over her body and her life. Libby's novel is not for the faint of heart or those with short attention spans. Teens expecting gory details will not be disappointed, but they will have to wait through most of the book as Erzebet transforms from a spoiled little girl to a woman obsessed with staying beautiful no matter what the cost. The first-person narrative style gives a disturbingly human glimpse into Erzebet's character. Libby's unreliable narrator blurs the lines between reality and insanity, leaving the reader to choose the truth. Give this book to teens looking for something deep and long to bite into.