Verwandte Artikel zu House of Thorns

House of Thorns - Softcover

Strychacz, Isabel

 
9781665942607: House of Thorns
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1665942606 ISBN 13: 9781665942607
Verlag: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

In the vein of The Haunting of Hill House, a teen returns to the mysterious house from her past to search for her missing sister and uncover the truth of Brier Hall in this “beautifully creepy tale of love, loss, and healing” (Hannah Whitten, New York Times bestselling author of For the Wolf).

Lia Peartree is haunted—by memories, by her past, by secrets, by the ones she left behind. Five years ago, the Peartrees fled their home—the infamous ancestral Brier Hall—and never looked back. But her oldest sister went missing that night, and there’s been no sign of her since.

In the aftermath, the Peartrees are traumatized and get by however they can. Lia’s remaining sister Ali says yes to any bad idea, and Lia tries so desperately to be the perfect daughter that it’s tearing her apart. But as the five year anniversary of the night they left nears, Lia begins seeing her missing sister everywhere, and memories of Brier Hall won’t leave her alone.

When Ali disappears with no warning except a cryptic phone call—“don’t follow me when I’m gone”—Lia is sure she’s gone back to Brier Hall. Lia must go home one final time and face what haunts her in an effort to find her sisters and uncover the truth of her past.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Isabel Strychacz is from a small town in the San Francisco Bay Area. An alumna of Mills College with degrees in English and history, she is getting her MFA degree in creative writing from Manchester Metropolitan University. She currently lives in England with her husband and daughter where she works as a copywriter for a PR and communications agency. She’s the author of the novel Starling, House of Thorns, and Thirteen Midnights. You can find her online @IsabelStrychaczAuthor (Instagram, TikTok, and Threads), @IsabelStrychacz (X), and at IsabelStrychacz.com. 

Von der hinteren Coverseite

In the vein of The Haunting of Hill House, a girl must return to the house that killed one of her sisters in order to save the other in this atmospheric and eerie gothic novel.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One ONE
The walk through the parking lot from the car to the school’s front doors is long enough that any number of things might happen on the way, and I hate to leave anything up to chance. Once I open the car door and step onto the asphalt, it’s ninety-seven steps. Anything can happen in ninety-seven steps. The earth itself might open and swallow me whole.

Stranger things have happened.

I know this firsthand.

I peer out the window, glancing back and forth like there’s some tennis match going on, when really there’s just a quickly emptying parking lot. All the kids are milling up the stone steps and through the doors; the first bell has already rung, and the tardy bell is ticking closer, and it’s the last day of school so everyone just wants it over with already. I want it over with more than anybody, but I can’t make my fingers grab the door handle.

Come on, Lia, I scream in my head. Screaming wakes me up. Screaming, even if no one else can hear it, is a way to stop the boiling water inside from spilling over. My breath catches. It’s just ninety-seven steps.

My hands are jittery as I clench them in my lap, and I crack my knuckles, pops sounding throughout the car. I can hear my breath loud in my ears. I glance up into the rearview mirror—my face is pale and pinched, my blond hair loose around my face. It’s my eighteenth birthday today, but I barely made an effort; I could hardly drag myself out of bed. I stare at my reflection, dark blue eyes the color of the deepest part of the sea looking back. Eyes the same color as my sisters’. Ali.

Avery.

I can’t stop thinking about how I saw her today.

Her.

Avery looked seventeen years old, still, always. There I was, walking out of the coffee shop with an iced latte—the only way I was going to celebrate my birthday—in one hand and my phone in the other, and then there she was. I could feel her watching me, right in my peripherals. I’d frozen in place, cold trickling down my back despite the heat, and when I blinked she had moved. Closer. I could feel her breathing on me; a slight breeze wrapped around us and I swear a tendril of her blond hair floated around my shoulders. The knowledge that if I turned I would look her straight in the eyes was heavy on my mind.

And I couldn’t.

So instead I ran to my car, fumbling for the keys, birthday coffee falling to the asphalt, splattering everywhere. Forgotten.

And now here I am, unable to get out of my goddamn car because there’s a chance my missing—dead?—sister might be waiting for me.

Come on, Lia. My hands are shaking. I place one on the door handle and breathe out. I’m only ninety-seven steps away from the front doors.

Ninety-seven steps away from safety. Relative safety.

Because here’s another thing I know: Buildings are not as safe as people like to think. I’m not talking structurally. The flat, sun-soaked town of Daley sits right on the San Andreas Fault, after all, so one would hope these houses are sound.

I’m talking about the bones.

The memories that lie awake in the floorboards, waiting for someone to step on them. Out they come with a creak. I’m talking about the things that live inside houses, all the screams and fights and happy birthday songs and secrets told. Those things don’t leave.

Those things are dangerous.

It is ignorance, it is wishful thinking. It is the ostrich sticking its head in the sand, willfully oblivious to oncoming danger. It is the small child pulling all her limbs under the covers so the monsters can’t get her. I was that child, and here is what I learned: Houses are not safe. Homes will not protect you. The buildings simply like to pretend, to lull their prey into a false sense of security.

Sudden movement flashes by the window, followed by a sharp rap-rap on the glass, and I jump in my seat, a strangled scream never leaving my throat. Stuck.

Avery?

Amid the remaining kids hurrying into school, Diya stands at the side of my car, peering in through the window at me. Her dark hair whips around her shoulders and she shakes it back.

“The tardy bell’s about to ring!” she says through the closed window, the words muffled by glass. She then grins and shows off the bulging plastic bag dangling from her fingers. It has DALEY GAS MART emblazoned in blocky red letters on the stretched plastic. “Cupcakes!” Diya says. “Happy birthday!” Everything Diya says ends in an exclamation point, and she never asks me about my past: two of the reasons I hang out with her and her friend group. I’m on the fringes, even after years. It’s my own fault. I push them all away.

“Come on!” Diya says, and it sounds much nicer when she says it aloud than when I scream it in my mind. She cocks her head toward me, a flash of puzzlement finally crossing her face. Her eyes dart to my hand clenched on the steering wheel.

Get a grip, Lia! I scream in my head again, pinching the soft skin between my thumb and index finger until there’re little half-moon crescents from where my nails have dug in. Come on. Come ON! There’s someone waiting for me now. I have to get out of this car. My fingers are weak on the door handle. Legs: shaking. Mouth: dry. I tell myself that nothing can get me here in the parking lot of a bone-dry central California school. There’s CCTV everywhere. There’s Lori, the school security guard who holds court on her golf cart. There’s a Taco Bell and a coffee shop and the Daley Gas Mart right across the street. Super normal. Sunny. All the shadows meet their matching objects and none of them reach out toward me with sticky dark fingers. Loitering kids who are tempting both fate and the tardy bell are filming each other doing shitty kickflips off the curb. They all have faces undistorted by my memories. They are all just kids.

Everything is fine.

I get out of the car.

One step. Two. I forget that I’ve done this before, that I’ve done this multiple times a week for months now. Each time feels like the first. Each time the anxiety roots me in place, dragging me down, down…

“Hey,” says Diya, then trails off with a repeated, “Happy birthday…” Her voice dips low in uncertainty. “You okay?”

“Um. Yes,” I reply, noncommittal, flustered. My chest is still tight; I can’t talk when I can hardly breathe.

“Did someone say something?” she asks, still uncharacteristically serious.

I breathe out. Diya knows none of my inner issues, just the public ones. That’s the problem: This entire town knows the Peartree family’s public issues. A few years ago, the whole world knew, because a missing sister and fleeing from your house in the middle of the night get people’s attention. The comments used to bother me, but now I try to just ignore them. I can tell when the questions are coming; I can tell if someone recognizes me because a light comes into their eyes and you can literally see the moment the pin drops that that’s a Peartree! Now that I’m about to graduate, they tend to flip between “You’re that ghost girl, right?” and “But was it really haunted?”

It was worse before when my sister Ali was also still at school. Because upperclassmen’s questions tend to be blunt and hard-edged and not really questions at all: “Oh, Peartree. You’re Ali’s sister.”

I hate all questions...

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Verlag
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1665942606
ISBN 13 
9781665942607
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
webstar
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