What's on the back of the book:Not alive. Not dead.
Somewhere in between lie the Beautiful Dead.
Something strange is happening in Ellerton High. Jonas, Arizona, Summer, Phoenix. All dead within a year.
Jonas Jonson is the first to die, in a motorcycle accident. But there are many unanswered questions, and the three deaths that follow are equally mysterious.
Grief-stricken Darina can't escape her heartache or visions of her dead boyfriend, Phoenix, and the others who died. And all the while, the sound of beating wings echoes inside her head ...
Are the visions real? Or do the Beautiful Dead only exist in Darina's traumatized imagination?
A piece from the book:
The first thing I heard was a door banging in the wind. It spooked me because I didn't even know there was a house here amongst the trees, this far out of town.
Slow down, heart, I thought. Darina girl, get a grip! But back then a falling leaf would have spooked me. It was two days after Phoenix had died.
So the door banged and my heart thumped, and I was looking for something on that hill, I don't know what. I walked to the top and looked over the ridge and there it was - an old log-built, falling-down house with a porch, a big old barn and one of those round water tanks on stilts, all rusty and decrepit. So was the truck parked at the front of the deserted house, with its fenders falling off and the roof stove in, and yellow grass growing knee-high around the porch.
It was the door of the barn that banged shut. Open-shut, open-shut, whenever the wind grabbed hold.
I guess most people would have walked away.
Not me. As I said before, I was lost and looking for answers to big questions about love, loss and the meaning of life. Darina on a mission, you might say. Like, how come four of my classmates at Ellerton High had died in the space of a year? Jonas, Arizona, Summer and now Phoenix. I mean, how weird and tragic was that? It scared the hell out of everyone, I can tell you.
And the last one - Phoenix - broke my teenage heart. I was in love with the guy, mostly from a distance. Then for two blissful months we were dating. My flower tribute to him, placed on the spot where he got stabbed, was pathetic. It read 'I'll miss you for ever, with all my love, Darina' and didn't even scratch the surface of the way I felt.
So I was going to stop that barn door banging then take a look around the ghost house. I wanted to get inside, see how the people lived - what plates they had put on their table, what chairs they had sat on.
But first the barn. The door was huge and held together by a hundred rusty nails. The inside was dark. I could see old horse halters hanging from hooks, a pair of dusty leather chaps, some cobwebby rakes and brushes.
And a whole bunch of people standing in a circle, chanting a rhyme at a guy standing in the centre. I didn't believe my eyes when I first saw him, but that guy was Phoenix, stripped to the waist as true as I stood there.
Phoenix who had died from a knife wound between his shoulder blades. The knife went through a major artery and he bled to death.
No comments:
Post a Comment