1
" And when we jumped, there was this moment, right before the drop. Shimmering suspension, as if the air around us had turned just a little closer to honey. Just for long enough to let me watch her watching me, her pretty eyes squinched against the sun. Her mouth open wide and round in the fullest laugh, as if she could gulp down all the joy of being with me in the air.
And then we fell, obviously, but that wasn't the point.
Aloft. That was the word I wanted. That feeling both of freedom and not being alone.
Aloft is what we'd had that day, what Niko always meant to me. "
― Lana Popović , Fierce Like a Firestorm (Hibiscus Daughter, #2)
2
" For me, it was the hibiscus flower, the petal red and fleshy as our mother trailed it over the tip of my nose, before she let me gum it to release its tart flavor. For Malina, it was a gleaming, perfect cherry, which Mama crushed into a paste that she let my sister suck from her ring finger. It was bad luck to name a daughter after the thing that first sparked the gleam, Mama said. So I was Iris, for a flower that wasn’t hibiscus, and my sister was Malina, for a raspberry. They were placeholder names that didn’t pin down our true nature, so nothing would ever be able to summon us. No demon or vila would ever reel us in by our real names. Even caught up in the story, Mama could never quite explain what the gleam looked like once she found it. "
― Lana Popović , Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter, #1)
18
" She is not a fruit," Luka said, sounding so affronted it actually made me laugh out loud.
"It's true, I'm not," I agreed, still giggling ridiculously, "I am, in fact, a female human. "
― Lana Popović , Wicked Like a Wildfire (Hibiscus Daughter, #1)
