Juniper Bean Resorts to Murder (Happily Ever Homicide, #1)

by Gracie Ruth Mitchell

Because no one expects to be set up with their little brother.

the kind of girl whose smile made you nervous, because you never knew what it meant.

I think we all think about weird things sometimes, but we’re never sure exactly how weird other people are, and we don’t want to give ourselves away for fear that we’re the strangest one in the room.

We all keep the dead in our own ways; they never leave us. Not really. The parting of life from a body can never erase memories or teachings or likenesses.

I’m just one of the people that talks to her dead, I guess. I’m okay with it.

I don’t know how it’s possible to miss someone and resent them, to love them and hate them all at the same time. To be glad they’re gone and simultaneously wish they were still here.

The human brain is little more than three pounds and can be held in two cupped hands, but the emotions it produces are so big, so nebulous and tangled. And sometimes those tangled emotions feel like thorny brambles that I’ve stumbled and fallen into, scraped knees and scarred palms that constantly remind me of the past. How much of that past do I keep? How much do I let go? And how do I separate the two?

Solomon the Spud. A potato. That’s our mascot: a potato.

“A potato statue feels wholly unnecessary,”

you’ll never come across anything in life that’s too difficult for you. Never more than you can handle.”

“Interesting that they gave him a belly button,”

We keep our dead, and our dead keep us. We remember them, and they in turn find us at the moments we don’t expect—a flash of memory on a summer’s day, a snippet of an old favorite song, a long-lost photograph unearthed.