Today I wanted to wish a happy release day to Lillie Lainoff and her debut novel One for All! This gender-bent OwnVoices retelling of the Three Muskateers is a great addition to your spring TBR!
Synopsis: Tania de Batz is most herself with a sword in her hand. Everyone in town thinks her near-constant dizziness makes her weak, nothing but “a sick girl”; even her mother is desperate to marry her off for security. But Tania wants to be strong, independent, a fencer like her father—a former Musketeer and her greatest champion. Then Papa is brutally, mysteriously murdered. His dying wish? For Tania to attend finishing school. But L’Académie des Mariées, Tania realizes, is no finishing school. It’s a secret training ground for a new kind of Musketeer: women who are socialites on the surface, but strap daggers under their skirts, seduce men into giving up dangerous secrets, and protect France from downfall. And they don’t shy away from a swordfight. With her newfound sisters at her side, Tania feels for the first time like she has a purpose, like she belongs. But then she meets Étienne, her first target in uncovering a potential assassination plot. He’s kind, charming, and breathlessly attractive—and he might have information about what really happened to her father. Torn between duty and dizzying emotion, Tania will have to lean on her friends, listen to her own body, and decide where her loyalties lie…or risk losing everything she’s ever wanted.
Genre: Young Adult, Retelling, Historical Fiction
Length: 400 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
About the Author: Lillie Lainoff is a writer, a fencer, and now, a writer who writes about fencing. She doesn’t understand why her parents gave a clumsy eight-year-old a saber, but she’s thankful for it every day. She grew up in Washington D.C. and graduated from Yale University in 2018, where she was managing editor of the Yale Daily News Magazine and a writing partner at the Yale Writing Center, as well as a Div I athlete and NCAA Championship competitor. She is the founder of Disabled Kidlit Writers. Her writing has received awards from the Los Angeles Review, Glimmer Train, and the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and has been featured in The Washington Post Outlook and Washington City Paper, amongst other places. She received her MA in Creative Writing Prose Fiction from the University of East Anglia. One for All, her debut novel, will be published by FSG in 2022.
You can order your copy of One for All here, here and the audiobook here (The audiobook is narrated by Mara Wilson!!)!