“Hello,” a boy’s voice said. Dana turned. A smiling boy was sitting on the rock wall, watching her pick the sticky fruit. Though he was about her age, Dana had never seen him before; but her family tended to keep to themselves, so that was not unusual. He was skinny, with unruly blond hair that fell to his shoulders, and his green eyes shone in a friendly fashion. Even so, she did not reply to his greeting but merely returned to her berry picking. “My name is Kai,” the boy said to her back. Picked up randomly because I absolutely…
17 CommentsAuthor: Jenny Hamilton
“I’ll let you out of your contracts if you want, so you can get jobs with other circuses, but I’m telling you they’ll all go bust if this keeps up – just like the cinemas. But you know where they ain’t got the telly yet? Spain! And you know how I know? Because I been there!!”He stopped to let the magnitude of this revelation sink in. While they had been loafing the winter away, he, Sam Marvel, had been on the job and had gone ferreting out the situation. “That’s right,” he continued, “Spain. There’s telly in some of the…
3 CommentsEdward the Sexy Vampire: Before you, Bella, my life was like a moonless night. Very dark, but there were stars – points of light and reason. And then you shot across my sky like a meteor. Suddenly everything was on fire; there was brilliancy, there was beauty. When you were gone, when the meteor had fallen over the horizon, everything went black. Nothing had changed, but my eyes were blinded by the light. I couldn’t see the stars anymore. And there was no more reason for anything….There was no distraction from the agony. My heart hasn’t beat in almost ninety…
4 CommentsWhen she reached the first tree she swung around it to face me, and if the trees looked like men, she looked as young as Julian.”Still here – oh, still here!” she called – halfway singing, really. “Oh, still holding to Stourhead earth, they and I.” She hooked her arm around the tree and swung again, as though she was dancing with it. I knew she couldn’t have touched it, felt the bark or the dry leaves, any more than I could have felt her arm against mine – but nobody looks as beautiful, as joyous, as Tamsin looked right…
Leave a CommentFirst my father (who was buying it for my very-difficult-to-get-presents-for mother), and then my mother told me about this book, so I heard about it from them; and in the first place it was picked up at random by my father, who knows that my very-difficult-to-get-presents-for mother enjoys reading memoirs written by neurotic people with a sense of humor. I waited until down here to put an excerpt, mainly because I wanted to defend my choice of excerpt. I am quoting this bit not because it is perfectly representative of the book at large (not that it isn’t – it’s…
2 CommentsCarlos was a minor character in the story [I was writing], a juvenile delinquent with a terminal illness. Although I had given Carlos tattoos and a bald head, he failed to impress my editor. She thought he needed a personality. And “please please please,” she urged in one of her notes, “give him a different name.” Los Angeles is the youth gang capital of the world, so I figured Duane must have had to write about them at some point. I asked if he could recommend any good books about juvenile delinquents that I could use for research. He thought…
Leave a CommentThe gruel disappeared; the boys whispered each other, and winked at Oliver; while his next neighbours nudged him. Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger, and reckless with misery. He rose from the table; and advancing to the master, basin and spoon in hand, said: somewhat alarmed at his own temerity:”Please, sir, I want some more.” The master was a fat, healthy man; but he turned very pale. He gazed in stupefied astonishment on the small rebel for some seconds, and then clung for support to the copper. The assistants were paralyzed with wonder; the boys with fear.…
3 CommentsDon’t call me a fairy. We don’t like to be called fairies anymore….I am a changeling – a word that describes within its own name what we are bound and intended to do. We kidnap a human child and replace him or her with one of our own. The hobgoblin becomes the child, and the child becomes a hobgoblin. Not any boy or girl will do, but only those rare souls baffled by their young lives or attuned to the weeping troubles of this world. The changelings select carefully, for such opportunities might come along only once a decade or…
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