Delicate Monsters
A Novel
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Descripción editorial
When nearly killing a classmate gets seventeen-year-old Sadie Su kicked out of her third boarding school in four years, she returns to her family's California vineyard estate. Here, she's meant to stay out of trouble. Here, she's meant to do a lot of things. But it's hard. She's bored. And when Sadie's bored, the only thing she likes is trouble.
Emerson Tate's a poor boy living in a rich town, with his widowed mother and strange, haunted little brother. All he wants his senior year is to play basketball and make something happen with the girl of his dreams. That's why Emerson's not happy Sadie's back. An old childhood friend, she knows his worst secrets. The things he longs to forget. The things she won't ever let him.
Haunted is a good word for fifteen-year-old Miles Tate. Miles can see the future, after all. And he knows his vision of tragic violence at his school will come true, because his visions always do. That's what he tells the new girl in town. The one who listens to him. The one who recognizes the darkness in his past.
But can Miles stop the violence? Or has the future already been written? Maybe tragedy is his destiny. Maybe it's all of theirs.
Delicate Monsters is Stephanie Kuehn at her finest.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kuehn's lacerating third novel centers on three deeply damaged teenagers, the "delicate monsters" of the title. Sadie, the half-Chinese daughter of a well-to-do California vineyard owner, is a sadist who has returned home to Sonoma after her role in the near-death of a classmate at her most recent boarding school. Her classmate and former childhood friend, Emerson, seems more sympathetic at first it isn't his fault that his father committed suicide, leaving the family in poverty but he, too, has dark secrets. Then there is Emerson's younger brother, Miles: physically and mentally ill, possibly psychic, and a nonstop victim of their high school's bullies. Amid virtually useless parents, teachers, and counselors, and plenty of alcohol, sex, and pain, these three stagger through the agonies of past and present, hurting each other and others as they go. Kuehn (Complicit) once again proves herself a talented writer in a tough, punishing novel about the damages we inflict on others and the shaky defenses we build to mask trauma and guilt. Ages 14 up.
