Of Metal and Wishes

Zusatztext A slaughterhouse with a deep! dark secret makes for a lovely gothic setting for this dramatic homage to Phantom of the Opera...Fine has written an alluring novel with a lovely setting in which readers will revel. Informationen zum Autor Sarah Fine is the author of Of Metal and Wishes , Of Dreams and Rust , The Impostor Queen , The Cursed Queen , The True Queen , and The Guards of the Shadowlands series. She was born on the West Coast, raised in the Midwest, and is now firmly entrenched on the East Coast. When she’s not writing, she’s working as a child psychologist. Visit her at SarahFineBooks.com. Klappentext From the author of The Guards of the Shadowlands series comes a love story for the ages, set in a reimagined industrial Asia, in which a 16-year-old girl is torn between her love for an oppressed factory worker and appeasing the ghost who is determined to protect her against any threat.Of Metal and Wishes IF I BELIEVED in the devil, I’d give him credit for the shift whistle at the Gochan One factory. Its shriek rips me from a dream of the wind whispering through flowering dogwood trees. I fold my pillow over my ears, crush it down, and think of my mother singing me to sleep. She always used to, until her voice faded to a raspy croak and it hurt her to speak. Now there’s no music in my life except in my memories, but that’s okay, because I live there as much as I can. The shrill of the whistle goes on and on, calling to the workers. It’s as much a welcome as a warning; if any of them are still in their bunks, it’s going to come out of their pay. But I don’t have to worry about that. My father runs the factory’s medical clinic, and it’s always open. We live above it, and when people need the doctor, they ring a little bell outside the clinic door. When it’s an emergency, they crash right in. The awful sound ends as abruptly as it began, and I let the pillow fall away from my face. My father is standing a few feet from my sleeping pallet. He raises the window curtain and looks toward the front gate of the factory compound, then lifts his pocket watch to the light. It’s a heavy old thing, too fancy to be clipped to his sagging trousers with patched knees, but my mother gave it to him when he graduated from medical school, and he’s worn it every day since. He flips it shut with a soft click. “Five minutes earlier than yesterday. That’s a rather dirty trick.” I pull my blanket over my head. A month ago my life changed forever. Now, instead of living in a warm cottage with a lovely garden, I live on the factory compound. Instead of sitting in a kitchen and inhaling the earthy scent of stewing vegetables, I sit in a cafeteria and pick at starchy rice or thin soup shoveled from enormous vats. Instead of reading the classics, I read medical texts. Instead of the feather lightness of my mother’s touch, I feel the dry, antiseptic rasp of my father’s. Instead of embroidering silk, I embroider skin. I actually don’t mind that part. My father is looking down at me when I finally peek out from under the blanket. The lines of his round face are deeper in the shadows of almost dawn, and his brown eyes look as inky black as his hair. “You’re going to have to get used to it, Wen.” “Don’t remind me, please,” I whisper. He winces. “I’ll make tea.” He walks from the room. I sit up and swing my feet to the floor. There’s a chill in the air and I shiver. I pull my braid from the neck of my nightgown. It’s a thick black rope, long enough to wrap around my throat in my sleep. I get ready quickly, pulling on my forest green dress with the intricate embroidered vines coiling at the ...

Product details

• Authors: Sarah Fine
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster USA
• Languages: English
• Age Recommendation: ages 12 to 17
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 05.08.2014
• EAN: 9781442483583
• ISBN: 978-1-4424-8358-3
• No. of pages: 320
• Subject: Children's and young people's books