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The Empress of All Seasons by Emiko Jean

Each generation, a competition is held to find the next empress of Honoku. The rules are simple. Survive the palace's enchanted seasonal rooms. Conquer Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall. Marry the prince. All are eligible to compete--all except yokai, supernatural monsters and spirits whom the human emperor is determined to enslave and destroy. Mari has spent a lifetime training to become empress. Winning should be easy. And it would be, if she weren't hiding a dangerous secret. Mari is a yokai with the ability to transform into a terrifying monster. If discovered, her life will be forfeit. As she struggles to keep her true identity hidden, Mari's fate collides with that of Taro, the prince who has no desire to inherit the imperial throne, and Akira, a half-human, half-yokai outcast. Torn between duty and love, loyalty and betrayal, vengeance and forgiveness, the choices of Mari, Taro, and Akira will decide the fate of Honoku in this beautifully written, edge-of-your-seat YA...
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Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuire (Wayward Children #2)

Down Among the Sticks and Bones is calm and dark, unafraid of gore; more interested in the slow transformation of two people distorted by ill-fitting molds, suddenly released to find very different paths with new kinds of darkness, surety settling in their bones.

This was a (relatively) calm way to learn more of a very strange and haunting story that was briefly described in Every Heart a Doorway. I'd been intrigued by Jack and Jill and I loved this opportunity to learn more about them. There's a lot of care here, for the characters and the audience. At several points the unnamed narrator tells us that a particular very bad thing happens, and trusts us to manage our own imaginations as to whether we'd like to dwell on gory details. Certain kinds of darkness are left unsaid, while others are dragged into the light, given no shadows in which to hide.

It's a horrific tale, darker somehow for the feeling of creeping inevitability granted by knowing how it ends before it's begun. It's about the journey when we already know the destination, and I treasure the path this pulled me along. If you were comfortable with the kind of darkness and horror in the first book then you'll likely be fine with this one. It feels like slowly probing the edges of a certain level of grim atmosphere and familiarity with death, turning over tiny pieces of something shattered and exhaling slowly when it's as bad as you thought, but no worse; you already knew it had broken.

CW for murder, gore, grooming, major character death. 

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A slightly open clothing trunk rests on a stone-covered hillside

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