about the book
Since she was fourteen, Amber has been locked up in the Aurora Hills Secure Juvenile Detention Center with some of the most violent teenage girls in the state. Charged with manslaughter, she pleaded innocent, but no one believed her.
At the end of Amber’s third summer, all of the chambers of the detention center open. With the lights out, no guards on duty, and a storm raging outside, the girls riot and run free for the first time in weeks, months, or years. Amber remains in her cell.
Violet, a ballerina, is very different from Amber. Violet could almost be considered two different people. When she’s onstage, she loves the crowd. When she dances, she dances for them, feeds on them. And the crowd is all for Violet, basking in her movements. But offstage, she hates people. And after this summer, she is free, bound for Julliard. Before she goes, she takes one last look for Orianna in the tunnel of trees behind the theater.
Orianna was a dancer, but Orianna is dead…killed behind the dance theater. She links the two very different lives of Amber and Violet, and now angels hold the power to present the whole picture of the girls’ darkest secrets—a picture both Amber and Violet would rather leave unseen.
about the author
Young adult author Nova Ren Suma has received much acclaim for her many YA novels. She has been recognized by organizations such as The Boston Globe, NPR, School Library Journal, YALSA, and Amazon. Additionally, she’s received fiction fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony.
Aside from novels, she has also authored a short story titled “The Birds of Azalea Street” published in the anthology Slasher Girls & Monster Boys; and an essay of hers will appear in the anthology Feminism for the Real World in 2017.
Before her success, Nova grew up along the Hudson Valley. Some of her less serious careers have included ice-cream scooper, babysitter, daycare worker, and bookstore cashier, and her early teenage years weren’t easy. But she can still remember them like yesterday, and she says her writing is aimed for the type of girl she was.
Nova earned a bachelor’s degree in writing and photography at Antioch College and an MFA in fiction at Columbia University. She worked as a production editor and copy editor for publishers such as HarperCollins and Penguin, worked as assistant editor at Marvel Comics, and was an editorial and production associate at a comic publisher called RAW Books.
Nova has since been teaching creative writing. She currently works as a visiting faculty member at Vermont College of Fine Arts, teaching in the Writing for Children & Young Adults low-residency MFA program. She has also taught YA novel writing at Columbia University, Arizona State University, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Highlights Foundation, and the Writing Barn in Austin, Texas.
Nova now resides in New York City.
Source:
Author website
Author biography: Wikipedia
Author interview: Omnivoracious
Also by Nova Ren Suma:
17 & Gone. Dutton Juvenile. 2013.
Imaginary Girls. Dutton Juvenile. 2011.
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