Winterspell

There's plenty of violence, onstage and off. Details of a mother's death. Generations of warfare between humans and magical beings play out. Gruesome deaths at the hands of humans and monsters. A protagonist describes how he tortured and killed faeries in his earlier life. A sadistic doctor tortures orphan girls in his laboratory and threatens to do the same to Clara's little sister if Clara doesn't give in to his creepy advances. Clara dreams of clawing his face to pieces. "She imagined the viscera of his eyeballs curdling beneath her nails. He would be afraid, the fear on his face reflecting what he must so often see on her own. And Godfather would stand beside her, nodding in approval, directing her how best to slice him to pieces."

Clara takes sexual interest in mysterious statues and seeks refuge in a "pleasure house," where she becomes an unwilling (but excited) participant in a sex show. She and Nicholas are propositioned by a prostitute. Some nudity and frequent parading around in revealing clothing. There's little explicit detail, but a great deal of overheated faux propriety, e.g. " ... her fingers brushed against the cotton breeches she hid under her gowns every morning. To feel the contours of her legs unimpeded by the usual layers of fabric made her shudder, as though she were touching some alien thing. The knobs of her knees, the curving lines of her thighs... She drew her hands away. She did not trust the tingling sensation her touch produced, and she was quite sure that the prospect of such a sensation, of such intimacy, was what made Dr. Victor watch her so hungrily."

Occasional "damn." One "piss."

Clara's father has been a hopeless drunk since her mother was murdered. In the world of Cane, the faery queen keeps the population enslaved with addiction to a drug called "sugar"; Clara consumes it in the course of various adventures, mostly as a matter of blending in with the crowd.

Parents need to know that Winterspell, Claire Legrand's first young-adult novel, is loosely based on The Nutcracker -- but E.T.A. Hoffman's dark original, not the Christmas classic ballet. It combines the grotesquely imaginative creepiness seen in The Cavendish School for Boys and Girls with luridly suggestive scenes involving both opposite- and same-sex couples, as well as violent sexual predators who victimize children. There's no explicit detail, but lots of overheated dwelling on what the Victorian narrator describes as shameful feelings. Characters die violently (sometimes, apparently, more than once), and the central couple spends most of the book worrying about whether they'll have to kill or enslave each other, and how they'll feel about it.