In this modern version of Beauty and the Beast, unhappy fifteen-year-old Carlo has been living in the basement of his family's mansion ever since his father died--until beautiful fifteen-year-old Belle shows up to pay for the rose her father picked in the garden.
For fourteen years Dandelion has lived in a house with the witch she thinks is her mother, but when she shows signs of growing up the witch locks her in a tower in the woods--where a boy named Arthur hears her singing.
Hansen and Gracie are orphaned twins, but their ability to hear each other even when they are not together has made them strange, and prevented them from being adopted--so when the evil officials from the orphanage abandon them in the woods they set out to find a home of their own.
John Knox falls passionately and irrevocably in love with Rachel McAllistair the first time they meet. He interviews her for his radio show, and afterwards, when he tells her how impressive she was, she hits him, square on the jaw. Undeterred, he pursues her, promising to love her and never to leave her. This promise becomes his burden, as her behaviour whirls out of control. She is abusive and cruel. And yet he stays. Even when she does something so awful that his life is changed forever. And that point, on which his life turns, leads him to an unexpected connection with a man who suffered a terrible injury in the first world war. The Death of the Poet is a daringly honest, transfixing story about being in thrall to someone, being a victim and a protector, and how early promise can turn into an utterly unrecognisable life. An exploration of violence and what it means to be a man in the modern world, it's controversial, devastating, and, in a complicated way, romantic too.
Chantella dreams her singing will take her away from chores and grant a Cinderella-worthy happy ever after. Whereas Cassie walks through the streets in her red coat, looking over her shoulder as a dark figure named Caleb Woolf follows her... In this collection of short stories, normal kids find themselves lost in the woods or locked in a tower - situations that might seem familiar. But fairy tales have a dark side and not all have a happy ending...
I'm not, at heart, a jumper; it's not my sort of thing . . . I think I knew all the time I was sizing up the bridge that the strong possibility was I'd go home, attend my sister's wedding as invited, help hook-and-zip her into whatever she wore, take the bouquet while she received the ring, through the nose or on the finger, wherever she chose to receive it, and hold my peace when it became a question of speaking now of forever holding it.' It is the hottest June on record and the longest day of the year. Cassandra Edwards -tormented, intelligent, mordantly witty - leaves her graduate studies and her Berkeley flat to drive through the scorching heat to her family's ranch. There they are all assembled: her philosopher father, smelling sweetly of five-star Hennessy; her kind, fussy grandmother; her beloved, identical twin sister Judith, who is about to be married - unless Cassandra can help it.