Back to the Bright Before - Hardcover

Nolte, Katherin

 
9780593565100: Back to the Bright Before
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 059356510X ISBN 13: 9780593565100
Verlag: Random House Books for Young Readers, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

A magical adventure about two brave siblings determined to find a treasure that could save their family.

When eleven-year-old Pet Martin’s dad falls from a ladder on their family farm, it isn’t just his body that crashes to the ground. So does every hope her family had for the future. Money is scarce, and Pet’s mom is bone-tired from waiting tables at the local diner, and even with the extra hours, it’s not enough for a third surgery for Pet’s dad. Her five-year-old brother, Simon, now refuses to say anything except the word “cheese.” Worst of all? The ladder accident was Pet’s fault.

She’s determined to fix things—but how? Good old-fashioned grit…and maybe a little bit of magic. 

When a neighbor recites a poem about an ancient coin hidden somewhere on the grounds of the local abbey, Pet forms a plan. With her brother, a borrowed chicken, and a stolen pony, Pet runs away from home. If she can find the coin, Daddy can have his surgery, Momma can stop her constant working, and Simon might speak again. But Pet isn't the only one who wants the coin…which means searching for it is more dangerous than she ever imagined. 

This dazzling debut novel filled with magic, family, and adventure is sure to be an instant classic.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Katherin Nolte received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. Her fiction has appeared in dozens of publications and won multiple awards, but it was a late-night ER visit with her four children that inspired her to write Back to the Bright Before. An Ohio native, she currently lives with her family in Iowa.

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Chapter 1


I didn’t scream when Daddy fell from the ladder. My mouth opened, my throat became tight, but I was as silent as our woodpile when his body tumbled to the earth. And he did tumble--like an acrobat, end over end, his giant form arcing in slow motion toward the ground.

“Impossible,” Momma said later, when she asked me to tell every single detail of what had happened. “People don’t fall in slow motion from the sky.”

But he did.

I saw him. I’m eleven years old, which, trust me, is old enough to know fact from fiction.

“Unbelievable,” said Momma when I told her how, right before he hit the ground, his body straightened into a horizontal line and floated like a feather. “Two-hundred-pound men don’t drift like feathers when they fall.”

“Well, Daddy did,” I said. “I saw him.”

Momma gripped her coffee cup. She was sitting at the kitchen table. Mascara was smudged around her eyes because she’d been crying. It was midnight. Simon was in bed. I should have been in bed, too.

“Get out of here, Pet,” she said, voice shaking. “Your lies are making me want to smack you.”

I will tell you three things. My name is Perpetua. I do not tell lies. And I was very much happy to oblige.



“That must have been a horrifying experience” is what Sister Melanie said when I told her about Daddy’s fall--which was much better than being told you were an impossible, unbelievable liar.

“Do you believe me?” I asked after describing how first he tumbled, then he floated before hitting the ground. It was always hard to tell what Sister Melanie was thinking. She spoke carefully, like each word cost her a nickel and she only had a few quarters in her pocket.

“Of course.”

I looked at her. She was the youngest nun in the convent, only twenty, and she had long black hair that she wore in two braids, and equally dark eyes. On her pale face was a pair of bright red glasses.

“I didn’t think nuns could wear red” is what Momma had said when I told her about Sister Melanie’s glasses.

“Why not?” I asked.

“It has to be against one of their rules. They’ve got a whole dictionary’s worth of them.” Momma waved her bottle of glass cleaner dismissively. She was dusting the TV. Simon always smudged it because he thought he could feel people’s hair if he ran his fingers across the screen. He never could, of course, but he kept on trying just the same.

My momma doesn’t know much about nuns--and that’s not an insult. Just a fact. She’s never walked down the gravel road with Simon and me to visit the abbey, so why she thought there was a rule against nuns wearing red glasses was anybody’s guess.

I didn’t try to correct her, though, because she was in one of her moods, and the look on her face as she scrubbed at that TV screen was one baby step shy of furious.



There was a part I left out when Momma asked me to tell her second by second how my daddy fell. I didn’t lie about what happened, but what I did was start the telling after the most critical detail. I didn’t tell this fact to Sister Melanie, either. That’s because I’m proud--not of what happened--no, most certainly not--but just . . . proud. I’m smart. I can do one hundred multiplication problems in one minute, twenty-eight seconds--the fastest in my class. I’m strong. I carried Simon home from the nuns once, when he fell and scraped his shin and made a big show about not walking home, plopping down, toad-like, in the middle of the road. Well, I swung Toad Boy onto my back and carried him the three-quarters of a mile to our fence. I’m tall, which is good for reaching things, and I’m skinny, which makes slipping through cracks easy. I love my freckles and my long hair--strawberry-blond, everyone calls it.

So, see, I’m proud--and when you’re proud and you make a giant mistake, you don’t want anyone to know. When you’re proud, failure is the bitterest fruit you can bite.

That’s why I didn’t tell Momma or Sister Melanie what I did. But I’m going to tell you.

Some of what happens in this story might seem unbelievable. The things Simon and I saw, what we did, what we found--you might wonder if it’s really true. That’s why it’s important you believe me. You have to know in the hot, beating center of your heart that Perpetua Martin doesn’t lie.

So here goes.

It was my fault Daddy fell from the ladder. His getting hurt--and everything that came after--was all because of me.

It was a Saturday in November. The sun was shining. The air was warm. The wind was whirling leaves into miniature tornadoes. Daddy was cleaning the gutters on our farmhouse. I had the camera Nana sent me from California. It was two days past my birthday, and I was itching to try it out.

“Daddy, look down here,” I called up to him. Simon was beside me, of course. He’s always beside me, like a piece of gum that no matter how much you scrape, you can’t get off the sole of your shoe.

“Hold your horses, Pet,” Daddy said in his big, booming voice. Everything about my daddy was big--his six-and-a-half-foot body, his dark, bushy beard, the waves in his hair. “Your dad looks like a lumberjack,” kids at school said, trying to be mean, but I always took it as a compliment.

“Please,” I cried, “just for a second--look. I want to take your picture.” I haphazardly pointed the camera up at him. Really, I had no idea how to use the thing. It was fancy, with a big flash on top and a lens almost as long as a telescope.

“Ridiculous,” Momma had said when the camera arrived in the mail. “To send a child a five-hundred-dollar camera. What was she thinking?”

There was a note in the box, on a square of scalloped ivory-colored stationery:


Dearest Perpetua,

May this lens be a window to a larger world. Happy birthday.

Fondly,

Nana


I had never seen or even spoken to my nana. Nobody in my family had since before I was born. She was my sole living grandparent, but she was so absent, she might as well have been a ghost. Except on birthdays. Every year, she sent Simon and me an expensive gift with a cryptic phrase on a piece of scalloped stationery. Her extravagance drove Momma nuts. Daddy didn’t care, though. He never let Nana bother him.

“Say cheese,” I said to Daddy, atop his ladder. “Say cheese, please.”

Then Simon picked it up. “Cheese, please! Please, cheese!” he cried like a parrot.

Finally, Daddy looked. He turned his head, high above me, and even though he was so far away, up against the pale November sky, I could see his smile.

“Cheese!” he boomed, his voice a cannon blast.

And that’s when that awful wind whipped, the ladder tipped, and Daddy began to somersault through the air.


Chapter 2


Simon didn’t talk after that, which was a shame because I had taught him some pretty cool words. Even though he was only four, he could say indubitably, exuberance, and ex nihilo. (And because I want to prove to you that I don’t lie, I’ll tell you this: That last part is Latin, and I only know it because Sister Melanie taught it to me.)

So Simon turned silent--except for one word. One word he said in reply to everything. Cheese.

Sometimes it was appropriate, like when I asked,...

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Verlag
Random House Books for Young Readers
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
059356510X
ISBN 13 
9780593565100
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Zeichner
Bricking Jen
Anzahl der Seiten
208
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Purmerul LTD
https://strengholt.nl/en/

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