A.J. Steiger

The Painted Man is here. I feel him in the darkness. He says, "If you let me in, I'll make the pain stop." God help me, I want to let him. After losing his delivery job - the last thing binding him to an empty life - Eddie Luther, veteran and drifter, drives into the snowy woods with a bottle of sleeping pills. But instead of eternal silence, Eddie hears a whisper inside his damaged ear. Help me . He follows the call and finds a cryptic journal filled with loneliness and longing, a journal whose words seem written for him alone. Guided by the clues in its pages, he embarks on a journey into a shadowy world beneath the small town of Devil's Fork, Nebraska - a world where girls become cats, televisions whisper prophecies, and only those cast out of society can see and use magic . . . Or maybe Eddie's sanity is slipping. All he knows for sure is that he's falling in love with someone he's never seen, someone who may be more than human - and who will change everything he thinks he knows about the world and his place in it.

Obviously I’m not what most people would describe as happy. But that has nothing to do with anything. Happiness is not a priority. Survival is. Alvie Fitz doesn’t fit in, and she doesn’t care. She’s spent years swallowing meds and bad advice from doctors and social workers. Adjust, adapt. Pretend to be normal. It sounds so easy. If she can make it to her eighteenth birthday without any major mishaps, she’ll be legally emancipated. Free. But if she fails, she’ll become a ward of the state and be sent back to the group home. All she wants is to be left alone to spend time with her friend, Chance, the one-winged hawk at the zoo where she works. She can bide her time with him until her emancipation. Humans are overrated anyway. Then she meets Stanley, a boy who might be even stranger than she is—a boy who walks with a cane, who turns up every day with a new injury, whose body seems as fragile as glass. Without even meaning to, she finds herself getting close to him. But Alvie remembers what happened to the last person she truly cared about. Her past stalks her with every step, and it has sharp teeth. But if she can find the strength to face the enemy inside her, maybe she’ll have a chance at happiness after all.