More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The flames of Hell have finally reached me like my father always warned.
“Listen to me. It’s finally happened. They found him in the swamp.”
I wasn’t my parents’ kind of girl, not on the inside, but I wasn’t anyone else’s, either.
We were alone this deep into the swamp. The frogs kept singing, the bugs kept whirring. Nothing cared that I was trapped in the coffin of his arms, drowning in fear.
We’ve never been good at fitting in, even when we try.
In the deep woods, I was prey. But right now, nowhere was as dangerous as home.
I had a sudden vision of Joan of Arc, tied to a stake and going up in flames. It was an image that had haunted me since I was a child, like Christ on his cross with his rivers of blood.
I am part of all that I have met,’” I recited softly. “‘Yet all experience is an arch through which gleams that untraveled world. Whose margin fades—’” I looked up from the fire to Everett, who watched me closely. “‘Whose margin fades for ever and forever when I move.’” A smile ghosted his lips. “For ever and forever. Amen.”
“Pain is how you know you’re alive, Ruth. It’s not something you should bury.”
His eyes didn’t leave my face. Like twin black holes reordering space and time to pull me in.
I’m beyond giddy: the earth is wild and beautiful and I’m alive inside it.
“Ah.” His bushy eyebrows raised. “A reader, then.” He eyed me. “Dangerous quality in a girl.”
It wasn’t just a book. It was how my heart had discovered hope.
Why did we fall in love like lit matches dropped in kerosene?
How do you draw a map of a place you’ve never been?
What is it about us teenage girls that claws so deeply under people’s skin?
