The Splendour Falls
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- £10.99
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- £10.99
Publisher Description
Sylvie Davies is a ballerina who can't dance. A broken leg ended her career, but what broke her heart was her father's death, and what's breaking her spirit is her mother's remarriage. Still reeling Sylvie is shipped off to stay with relatives in the back of beyond. Or so she thinks, in fact she ends up in a town rich with her family's history . . . and as it turns out her family has a lot more history than Sylvie ever knew. More unnerving, though, are the two guys she can't stop thinking about. Shawn Maddox, the resident golden boy, is the expected choice. But handsome and mysterious Rhys has a hold on her that she doesn't quite understand
Then Sylvie starts seeing things - a girl by the lake and a man with dark unseeing eyes peering in through the window . . . Sylvie's lost nearly everything - is she starting to lose her mind as well?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Seventeen-year-old Sylvie has recently lost both her father and her nascent career as a ballerina. Sent to visit family in Alabama during her newly remarried mother's honeymoon, Sylvie grapples not only with dislocation and grief, but with hallucinations in Central Park, in the airport and in her family's antebellum mansion, Bluestone Hill that she cannot control or explain. Her cousin Paula, an old-school steel magnolia, is no comfort, but Sylvie finds warmth in the competing attentions of theTom Sawyeresque Shawn Maddox and Rhys Griffith, a visitor from Wales with secrets of his own. As Sylvie learns more about Shawn, Rhys and the history of Bluestone Hill, she finds strength to understand her family's past and her own unsettling but hopeful future. Sylvie's voice is sharp and articulate, and Clement-Moore (the Maggie Quinn: Girl vs. Evil series) anchors the story in actual locations and history, offering au courant speculations about the nature of ghosts and magic. Her ear for both adolescent bitchery and sweetness remains sure, and her ability to write realistic, edgy dialogue without relying on obscenity or stereotype is a pleasure. Ages 14 up.
