"Complex and gripping...Newcomers to Arcadia will be captivated by the rich history, while those familiar with it will find that Sophia's legend grants them a new perspective on the earlier tales." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) "[The Lizard Princess] encourages big-picture thinking...The combination of a straightforward quest complicated by hindsight, with magic, science, and meditations on the building of myths and the role of stories, makes for a book not like much else out there...Gorgeously written and complex." --New York Journal of Books "This fantasy quest lends a hand toward making our contemporary world a little better."--Foreword Reviews "The impressive The Lizard Princess continues Tod Davies' imaginative History of Arcadia series with her trademark brilliant storytelling."--Largehearted Boy "Look inside this world and find wonder."--Kate Bernheimer, editor of Fairy Tale Review "Blending the magic of fairy tales with the great existential mysteries, Tod Davies leads us into a phantasmagorical world that resurrects the complex lore of times past with vibrant narrative energy."--Maria Tatar, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Fairy Tales "Imaginative." --Jack Zipes, author of The Irresistible Fairy Tale "Innovative form and spellbinding content ...Stories, as Tod Davies's History of Arcadia novels ultimately suggest, serve as a civilization's backbone, and it is therefore in stories too that we can discover the potential for fundamental change and a better society."--Marvels & Tales Bittersweet. Lush. Human. The Lizard Princess crosses mountains, oceans, deserts, and the Moon Itself to meet her fate and the fate of Arcadia on the Road of the Dead. Her reward is the Key that opens the door to the Domain of Life where wisdom trumps knowledge, as it should in all good tales about the world, whether Arcadia's, or our own. Tod Davies is the author of Snotty Saves the Day and Lily the Silent, the first two books in The History of Arcadia series, as well as the cooking memoirs Jam Today: A Diary of Cooking With What You've Got and Jam Today Too: The Revolution Will Not Be Catered. Unsurprisingly, her attitude toward literature is the same as her attitude toward cooking--it's all about working with what you have to find new ways of looking and new ways of being.

"Look inside this world and find wonder." --KATE BERNHEIMER, editor of My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me and author of The Girl Who Wouldn't Brush Her Hair Lily leads a serene life in Arcadia until the forces of Megalopolis invade. Rescued from slavery by a prince of Megalopolis, Lily is sent to retrieve a very important key. Aided by her friends, her dog Rex, and even Death herself, Lily's adventures take her from the Moons to the Bottom of the Sea, and finally back to Megalopolis, where she faces the decision of her life. Will she choose True Love and relinquish the key to those in Power or will she risk everything for who she is and return the key to Arcadia? Narrated by Lily's daughter, Sophia the Wise, this is a story about a girl who learns to live by her own light and--no matter how reluctantly--become the queen her people need. Full of Arcadian legends, it is also a fairy tale within a fairy tale about a troubled world not unlike our own, as well as a beautifully illustrated sequel to Snotty Saves the Day, which critics and booksellers hailed as "Lewis Carroll with footnotes by Jonathan Swift," while comparing it to authors whose work can be savored by readers of all ages: Susanna Clark, C.S. Lewis, George Orwell, and L. Frank Baum. The History of Arcadia series tells the story of a world that was literally formed by a story, by one person discovering and claiming who she really is ...and of the subsequent events that led first to a deceptively happy world, then to an inevitably tragic outcome, and finally to a slow rebuilding of the world on foundations more deeply and thoughtfully laid. Each book includes bonus Arcadian legends and fairy tales, and relates how the manuscript crossed the barriers between Arcadia and our own world to arrive at Exterminating Angel Press. The first two novels in the series are Snotty Saves the Day and Lily the Silent. Tod Davies lives with her husband and her two dogs at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, in Boulder, Colorado and in the alpine valley of Colestin, Oregon, where she discovered Snotty Saves the Day, the first Arcadian manuscript. Illustrator Mike Madrid is the author of Vixens, Vamps & Vipers: Lost Villainesses of Golden Age Comics; Divas, Dames & Daredevils: Lost Heroines of Golden Age Comics, and The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines.

"Mike Madrid is doing God's work. . . . mak ing] accessible a lost, heady land of female adventure." --"ComicsAlliance"
Between the covers of "Vixens, Vamps & Vipers," fans will rediscover the original bad girls of comics--as fierce and full of surprises as they were when the comic book industry was born. From murderous Madame Doom to He-She, dubbed by "io9" as "the most unsung comic book villain ever," Mike Madrid resurrects twenty-two glorious evildoers in fully reproduced comics and explores the ways they both transcend and become ensnared in a web of cultural stereotypes.
Among the deadly femme fatales, ruthless jungle queens, devious secret agents, double-dealing criminal masterminds, and gender-bending con artists are some of the very first women of color in comics. These women may have been overlooked in the annals of history, but--like their superheroine counterparts in "Divas, Dames & Daredevils"--their influence, on popular culture and the archenemies that thrill us today, is unmistakable.
Mike Madrid is the author of "Divas, Dames & Daredevils," a "ComicsAlliance" and "ComicsBlend" Best Book of the Year, and "The Supergirls," an NPR "Best Book To Share With Your Friends" and American Library Association Amelia Bloomer Project Notable Book. A San Francisco native and lifelong fan of comic books and popular culture, Madrid also appears in the documentary "Wonder Women The Untold Story of American Superheroines."

"ComicsAlliance" and "ComicsBlend" Best Comic Book of the Year
"BUST Magazine" "Lit Pick" Recommendation
Certified Cool(TM) in "PREVIEWS: The Comic Shop's Catalog"
"Mike Madrid gives these forgotten superheroines their due. These 'lost' heroines are now found--to the delight of comic book lovers everywhere." --STAN LEE
Wonder Woman, Mary Marvel, and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle ruled the pages of comic books in the 1940s, but many other heroines of the WWII era have been forgotten. Through twenty-eight full reproductions of vintage Golden Age comics, "Divas, Dames & Daredevils" reintroduces their ingenious abilities to mete out justice to Nazis, aliens, and evildoers of all kinds.
Each spine-tingling chapter opens with Mike Madrid's insightful commentary about heroines at the dawn of the comic book industry and reveals a universe populated by extraordinary women--superheroes, reporters, galactic warriors, daring detectives, and ace fighter pilots--who protected America and the world with wit and guile.
In these pages, fans will also meet heroines with striking similarities to more modern superheroes, including The Spider Queen, who deployed web shooters twenty years before Spider Man, and Marga the Panther Woman, whose feral instincts and sharp claws tore up the bad guys long before Wolverine. These women may have been overlooked in the annals of history, but their influence on popular culture, and the heroes we're passionate about today, is unmistakable.
Mike Madrid is the author of "Divas, Dames & Daredevils: Lost Heroines of Golden Age Comics" and "The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines," an NPR "Best Book To Share With Your Friends" and American Library Association Amelia Bloomer Project Notable Book. Madrid, a San Francisco native and lifelong fan of comic books and popular culture, also appears in the documentary "Wonder Women The Untold Story of American Superheroines."

"Mike Madrid is doing God's work...mak[ing] accessible a lost, heady land of female adventure." --ComicsAlliance "Sharp and lively ...[Madrid] clearly loves this stuff. And he's enough of a historian to be able to trace the ways in which the portrayal of sirens and supergirls has echoed society's ever-changing feelings about women and sex."--Entertainment Weekly "A long overdue tribute to [those] fabulous fighting females." --Stan Lee Mike Madrid has become known as a champion of women in comics and as the expert in Golden Age female characters. And now here is where it all began, as informative and entertaining as ever, in a revised and updated edition, including new illustrations and a new introduction, as well as an afterword bringing us up-to-date on what's happening with women in comics now. Mike Madrid is the author of Divas, Dames & Daredevils: Lost Heroines of Golden Age Comics; Vixens, Vamps & Vipers: Lost Villainesses of Golden Age Comics; and the original The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines, an NPR "Best Book To Share With Your Friends" and American Library Association Amelia Bloomer Project Notable Book. A San Francisco native and lifelong fan of comic books and popular culture, Madrid also appears in the documentary Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines and is the illustrator of two of The History of Arcadia books: Lily the Silent and The Lizard Princess.