Heartwood Box - Hardcover

Aguirre, Ann

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0765397641 ISBN 13: 9780765397645

Publisher: Tor Teen, 2019

Synopsis

Stranger Things meets The Lakehouse in Heartwood Box, a dark, romantic YA suspense novel with an SF edge from New York Times bestselling author Ann Aguirre.

In this tiny, terrifying town, the lost are never found.

When Araceli Flores Harper is sent to stay with her great-aunt Ottilie in her ramshackle Victorian home, the plan is simple. She’ll buckle down and get ready for college. Life won’t be exciting, but she’ll cope, right?

Wrong. From the start, things are very, very wrong. Her great-aunt still leaves food for the husband who went missing twenty years ago, and local businesses are plastered with MISSING posters. There are unexplained lights in the woods and a mysterious lab just beyond the city limits that the locals don’t talk about. Ever. When she starts receiving mysterious letters that seem to be coming from the past, she suspects someone of pranking her or trying to drive her out of her mind.

To solve these riddles and bring the lost home again, Araceli must delve into a truly diabolical conspiracy, but some secrets fight to stay buried...

About this title

About the Author

ANN AGUIRRE is a New York Times & USA Today bestselling author and RITA winner with a degree in English literature. She lives in sunny Mexico with her husband, children, and various pets. She likes books, emo music, and action movies. She writes all kinds of genre fiction for adults and teens.

From School Library Journal

Gr 8 Up—Araceli Flores Harper has been sent to spend her senior year of high school in a small town in upstate New York, in a ramshackle Victorian mansion, with a great-aunt she has never met. When she finds an old box in the attic, she begins corresponding with a soldier from the First World War. Then Araceli learns that people have been disappearing mysteriously for years, and there are strange lights and occurrences around a security-laden research compound in the woods. This is a unique and genre-bending tale; there are elements of a historical romance, a science fiction ghost story, and a spy thriller. However, the writing style, especially at the beginning of the novel, seems heavy-handed. Rather than setting the scene of an eerily empty small town, the narrator states that it is a strange place without much description. The rushed style may be due to the author attempting to cover so many different plotlines at once—Araceli is the new girl at school, falling in love with a World War I soldier and uncovering an underground experiment—but the way Aguirre ties together the disparate threads makes for a satisfying conclusion. A unique and exciting story imperfectly executed. VERDICT An additional purchase but with cross-genre appeal.—Jeri Murphy, C.F. Simmons Middle School, Aurora, IL

About this edition

• Publisher: Tor Teen
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0765397641
• ISBN 13: 9780765397645
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336