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It is February, 1876, an unusually warm year in Philadelphia. The Schuylkill has at last frozen over. The skaters are out:
From where they stand, the sisters see a game being played out on the river—two groups of boys whooshing a silver pail between them with sticks. The girls and women tend to hover near the river’s shore, or drift out farther, west and north. One girl in a gray-blue coat is sailing out and fast away on a diagonal, her coattails lifting up and flapping behind, revealing a skirt made entirely of summer yellow. With her shoulders pressed forward and her blades pushing her on, she seems intent on vanishing.
“Where do you suppose she’s going?” asks Anna.
“Perhaps to Birdsboro,” Katherine guesses, as they move across the frozen earth toward the frozen ice. “Or Valley Forge.” But just as Katherine predicts a long journey for the skater, the girl performs a miraculous pivot and begins to sail toward the shore, lifting one leg behind her as she does and holding herself up like an L, on an assured leg, causing one of the boys with the stick and the scarf to stop and stare. He hollers for her then and others do, too, and she remains intrepid above the steady foot on the frozen body of the Schuylkill. There are cheers. Applause that would be so much louder if it weren’t for the muffs and gloves.
6 Comments on Dangerous Neighbors Excerpt, last added: 2/18/2010
To say that I am honored by this profoundly (to me, and I hope to you) gorgeous cover for Dangerous Neighbors would be a supreme understatement. Laura Geringer, who bought this book for Egmont USA and edited it with a whole, sustaining heart, invited art director Neil Swaab to develop themes and possibilities. Within a few days this fabulously talented artist had created a half dozen jackets of such extraordinary quality that I longed to hang them here on my office walls. The very good people of Egmont USA chose this as the final and now officially approved jacket art.
I couldn't wait to share it with you.
Nor could I wait to share this description of the book, which was written not by me but by someone else who read with great care the novel I'd worked on for five years. It's startling, as I mentioned a few days ago, to see your work through another's eyes. It teaches you.
Could any two sisters be more tightly bound together than the twins, Katherine and Anna? Yet love and fate intervene to tear them apart. Katherine's guilt and sense of betrayal leaves her longing for death, until a surprise encounter and another near catastrophe rescue her from a tragic end. Set against the magical kaleidoscope of the Philadelphia Centennial fair of 1876, National Book Award nominee Beth Kephart conjures the sweep and scope of a moment in history in which the glowing future of a nation is on display to the disillusioned gaze of a girl who has determined that she no longer has a future. The tale is a pulse by pulse portrait of a young heroine's crisis of faith and salvation in the face of unbearable loss.
28 Comments on Dangerous Neighbors: The Cover Reveal, last added: 1/18/2010
That cover is gorgeous! And, I love that it has 'National Book Award Nominee' written across the top! I'm thrilled for you! And, the description makes me want to scoop it up pronto!!! Congrats. I can't wait to someday experience the joy of seeing the cover of a book I've written. What a thrill!!!
It is absolutely beautiful. I'm so happy for you and I can't wait to have a copy in hand, a steaming mug of tea by my side, and a long lonely day to read...
Yesterday, returning at last to the Centennial novel, I struggled to reclaim my footing—to go back in time to 1876. Nothing rushes writing. No short cuts can be taken. I had to sit again, settle in again, to the clatter on Broad Street, to the buildings, no longer there, to the strange interiors of spectacle buildings that turned Philadelphia into a near-circus for a year.
The vendors are out, roasting their chestnuts. There is a hawk with blood-colored feathers on the parapet of a slanted roof.
4 Comments on Dangerous Neighbors, last added: 8/31/2009
Oh, I look forward to this, too. Wasn't the hand and torch of the Statue of Liberty there? And people could walk through it? Plus wear very interesting hats.
It is February, 1876, an unusually warm year in Philadelphia. The Schuylkill has at last frozen over. The skaters are out:
I adore that last sentence!!
I love the last sentence, too! can't wait to read it!
What a perfect excerpt for a cold day! Thanks for sharing.
like it :)
You make me want to skate.
Lovely.