The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Donna's Review

Monday, April 26, 2010

All Light Beneath Ferns Stuff

When I wrote Light Beneath Ferns, I didn't really think in terms of genre. I just wrote a story about a girl who was a loner and wanted to stay that way because she was going to move in a new direction. A strange direction, but a new one. When it came out, I got emails from people telling me it wasn't romantic enough for a paranormal romance. Or it wasn't scary enough. Most of these people were within ten years of my age, which puts them way, way out of the age range for this novel which is about 14.

But of course some folks got it. I got emails from young teens who read parts of this at sleepovers and were creeped out. That was pretty much the idea. Then there were a few adults who loved it and wrote to me. One of these adults is Donna, who wrote probably my favorite review so far of this story.

Now, onto teens. As you know, they infest my house, leave shoes everywhere, carefully place empty milk cartons in the fridge and hog the computers. They are forgiven however as they took pity on me as I tried to make a simple book trailer.
Listening to me complain, they came over to the computer and put together this book trailer which I think is amazing. It's not a polished, marching band kind of trailer, but what's cool about it is that it is made by teens-

I have to especially thank Tiffany J. for her patience - not with the trailer, but with me and my technical blankness. She is responsible for the effects, and essentially the trailer as I had given up, Emma picked out the music which I think is perfect, Philip did a cameo, and Christopher explained to me that not everyone is meant to be technically competent. At least Christopher was patient enough to get me started. I think they did a great job! If you want to see more book trailers, you can watch and vote on your fav here.

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

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