What if you were told from the moment you were born that you were evil? Debut author Victory Witherkeigh creates a thrilling YA story that subverts expectations and finds that your true self is more important than what you’ve been told. Breaking through the good girl, virginal heroine stereotypes and inspired by Filipino mythology and gods, “The Girl,” (Cinnabar Moth Publishing, Dec 6, 2022) will blur the line between what is good and what is evil.

Already a finalist for Killer Nashville’s Claymore Award in 2020, The Girl follows a nameless main character only known as The Girl. She’s been told since a very young age that she was a mistake, a demon who shouldn’t have been born. Shunned by her parents, she’s shuffled between her parents’ and grandparents’ homes until her eighteenth birthday. The Girl is baffled by her ordinary life in Los Angeles. For all intents and purposes, she’s just like everyone else. That is, until the Demon comes to claim her.

Striving to bring more diversity to her story, Victory employs her Filipina/Pacific Islander heritage by combining pre-colonial myths of gods and demons and a modern setting creating the unique coming-of-age story of a first generation-born American. Victory Witherkeigh is able to connect her story with thousands of young first-generation American readers looking to see themselves in modern-day fantasy stories.

By developing a character that flits between human and demon, Victory creates an anti-heroine, a female character who isn’t your typical Mary Sue archetype. Resisting the urge to create another “golden” hero character in a fantasy story, The Girl examines the gray areas of growing up as a young female navigating through rejection, lost friendships, hurt relationships, and choosing imperfection.

For fans of The Sandman series and Wicked Fox, The Girl is an unlikely coming-of-age story filled with the search for identity, understanding parent expectations, and realizing that sometimes evil isn’t what you expect it to be.