Picture the Dead
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"A perfectly haunting combination."—Jon Scieszka, bestselling author and Caldecott Honor winner
"I loved Picture the Dead. Eerie, romantic, moody, and immersive. A beautifully illustrated gothic delight!"—Holly Black, New York Times bestselling author of Black Cat
"A tour de force, a remarkable feat of visual and verbal storytelling, as playful as it is serious, as haunting as it is delightful."—Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Jennie feels the tingling presence of something unnatural in the house now that Will is dead.
Her heart aches without him, and she still doesn't know how he really died. It seems that everywhere she turns, someone is hiding yet another clue. As Jennie seeks the truth, she finds herself drawn ever deeper into a series of tricks and lies, secrets and betrayals, and begins to wonder if she had every really known Will at all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this smartly restrained ghost story, orphan Jennie has already lost her twin brother to the Civil War, but when her brooding cousin, Quinn, returns wounded to their Massachusetts home, she learns that Will Quinn's brother and Jennie's fianc is also dead. Displaced and treated like a servant by her miserly aunt, Jennie succumbs to Quinn's romantic advances, in spite of a ghostly recurring sensation that she is being choked, and her sense that something's amiss with Will's death. Integrated letters, scrawled notes, and Brown's (How to Be) digital portraits (based on daguerreotypes) provide foreshadowing, while contributing to the unease that gnaws at Jennie's stark yet beautiful narration. Through her association with a spirit photographer, Mr. Geist, Jennie presumes that Will is jealous over her engagement to Quinn, but Griffin's (the Vampire Island series) house of mirrors unveils secrets more sinister. Despite the powerful conclusion, it's moments of quiet perception that should most resonate, as when Mr. Geist distinguishes between memory and haunting: "For if memory is the wave that buoys our grief, haunting is the undertow that drags us to its troubled source." Ages 12 up.
