Sixteen-year-old Mary Shelley Black lives up to her striking name—she’s a curious girl fascinated by science, living in 1918, “a year the devil designed,” as Mary puts it. With WWI raging on and Mary’s father on trial for treason, she goes to live with her Aunt Eva in San Diego, Calif., even as influenza sweeps across America, devastating the population and rendering those left behind paranoid and weary. Grieving for her childhood beau Stephen, who died while fighting overseas with the Army, Mary goes outside during a thunderstorm and is struck dead by lightning—for a few minutes. When Mary comes to, she discovers she can communicate with the dead, including Stephen. Winters’s masterful debut novel is an impressively researched marriage of the tragedies of wartime, the 1918 flu epidemic, the contemporaneous Spiritualism craze, and a chilling love story and mystery. Unsettling b&w period photographs appear throughout, à la Ransom Riggs’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, greatly adding to the novel’s deliciously creepy atmosphere. Ages 12–up. Agent: Barbara Poelle, Irene Goodman Agency. (Apr.)
Morris Award finalist Cat Winters loves a good ghost story. Her knockout young adult debut, In the Shadow of Blackbirds, tackled World War I, the Spanish flu, séances, and the weight of souls. In her The Cure for Dreaming, 1900 Oregon was the backdrop for a tale of young woman freeing her suppressed independence during the rise of hypnotism.
What do you get when you toss together a bunch of the most brilliant, talented, and creeptastic authors of YA and put them in a single volume of short stories that begs to be read with the lights on? The answer is this summer’s hottest anthology, Slasher Girls & Monster Boys, which features stories by […]
Morris award finalist Cat Winters excels at writing historical ghost stories, whether for teens (In the Shadow of Blackbirds) or adults (The Uninvited). So it’s no surprise that her latest book, The Steep & Thorny Way, is inspired by one of the most famous ghosts in literature: Hamlet’s father. Winters’ version of the Prince of Denmark’s tragic tale […]
A genre that defies easy categorization, magical realism is often associated with the work of Latin American authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez (100 Years of Solitude) and Laura Esquivel (Like Water For Chocolate). In magical realism, mystical or fantastic events are rendered as everyday occurrences. The extraordinary and the ordinary are intertwined; inseparable. In recent years, […]
There are very, very few things I love more in life than historical fiction and paranormal activity (for the record, those other things are my dog and giant servings of ice cream). Having grown up on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and stories about haunted houses, I’m a total freak for things that go bump in […]