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Ilsa J. Bick


Ilsa J. Bick

Ilsa J. Bick is a child psychiatrist, film scholar, former Air Force major and now a full-time author. Her critically acclaimed, award-winning YA novels include DRAW THE DARK, DROWNING INSTINCT, ASHES (a 2011 VOYA Perfect Ten) and SHADOWS. Ilsa currently lives in rural Wisconsin, near a Hebrew cemetery. One thing she loves about the neighbors: they're very quiet and only come around for sugar once in a blue moon. 

Books by Ilsa J. Bick

by Ilsa J. Bick - Fiction, Young Adult 14+, Youth Fiction
Emma Lindsay finds herself with nowhere to go, no place to call home. Her friends are dead. Eric, the perfect boy she wrote into being, and his brother, Casey, are lost to the Dark Passages. With no way of knowing where she belongs, she commands the cynosure, a beacon and lens that allows for safe passage between the Many Worlds, to put her where she might find her friends --- find Eric --- again. What she never anticipated was waking up in the body of Little Lizzie, all grown up --- or that, in this alternative London, Elizabeth McDermott is mad. 
In this London, Tony and Rima are "rats," teens who gather the dead to be used for fuel. Their friend, Bode, is an attendant at Bedlam, where Elizabeth has been committed after being rescued by Arthur Conan Doyle, a drug-addicted constable. 
Tormented by the voices of all the many characters based on her, all Elizabeth wants is to get rid of the pieces under her skin once and for all. While professing to treat Elizabeth, her physician, Dr. Kramer, has actually drugged her to allow Emma --- who's blinked to this London before --- to emerge as the dominant personality...because Kramer has plans. Elizabeth is the key to finding and accessing the Dickens Mirror. 
But Elizabeth is dying, and if Emma can't find a way out, everyone as they exist in this London, as well as the twelve-year-old version of herself and the shadows --- what remains of Eric, Casey, and Rima that she pulled with her from the Dark Passages --- will die with her.
by Ilsa J. Bick - Dystopian, Fiction, Thriller, Young Adult 14+

When her parents died, Alex thought things couldn't get much worse --- until the doctors found the monster in her head. She headed into the wilderness as a goodbye, to leave everything behind. But then the end of the world happened, and Alex took the first step down a treacherous road of betrayal and terror and death. Now, with no hope of rescue --- on the brink of starvation in a winter that just won't quit --- she discovers a new and horrifying truth.

by Ilsa J. Bick - Fantasy, Mystery

In the tradition of MEMENTO and INCEPTION comes a thrilling and scary young adult novel about blurred reality where characters in a story find that a deadly and horrifying world exists in the space between the written lines.


Even before the EMPs brought down the world, Alex was on the run from the demons of her past and the monster living in her head. After the world was gone, she believed Rule could be a sanctuary for her and those she'd come to love, but quickly learns that there are no safe havens anymore. In a post-apocalyptic world full of savagery, Alex is in the fight of her life against the adults, who would use her, the survivors, who don't trust her, and the Changed, who would eat her alive. 

by Ilsa J. Bick - Dystopian Fiction, Thriller, Young Adult 14+

Alex has escaped to a secluded forest in Michigan to confront her unknown future when an electromagnetic pulse explodes in the sky and instantly kills billions. She and a small band of survivors must struggle to survive the elements, each other, and the beckoning zombie apocalypse.