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If you love being swept away in a short space of time... if you love a book that makes you feel, whether you're a teenager or a centenarian--with 11 distinctly different and family-friendly stories--this book is for you...
Flowers for Virginia excerpt:
It was a bittersweet day, the day I went home. I was anxious to see Grandma and Grandpa, but the first thing I saw coming up to the back door, was my Ginny's flower garden. Or what had been her flower garden. Once beautiful, it had become overgrown with weeds and dead plants. Grandma had grown too frail to tend it. I weeded and watered, hoping it wasn't too late to at least save the marigolds. Afterward, I went into the house and, for the first time ever, sat in Ginny's chair. I rocked in the same methodical rhythm as she once had, back and forth five times each before pausing. I envisioned her twirling her hair and air-tracing the patterns on the floor.
I could almost hear her say, "Oh, look, June bug! Aren't those the prettiest flowers?" I stared at the floor. Yes, I could see them! The flowers in the gray and peach and ivory swirls of the linoleum. Yes, Ginny, I thought. They were indeed the prettiest flowers.
Excerpt from The Culling:
Andrew felt shame he hadn't shared his food with his mom and dad. His own mind had once been infected by the philosophy that the youth should rule the world and the old deserved to die. With only a minor twinge of guilt, he'd accepted it at face value; it would soon be time for his parents' deaths.
Wisdom had finally come the previous year with his twenty-fifth birthday. It was only then he could visualize a life without the people responsible for his birth and upbringing. They were the only two beings on the planet who knew him and loved him and their absence would make for a miserable, empty existence. Besides, they deserved to live. And yet, their deaths would come much too soon.
When he was still a child -- before statistics had been deleted from Old World history books -- he'd read how people often lived into their seventies and eighties. Sometimes, they remained alive into their nineties and beyond. Now, in One World, fifty was fatal. Anyone who didn't die from starvation or disease would succumb to the light.
The utter wrongness of such senseless genocide ripped a fissure in his heart. Too little, too late, he grieved, he'd begun sharing his own food with his family.
Excerpt from Tabby:
That was our last night sleeping in an old, musty station wagon. It was my mother's last week of working twelve-hour nights. Mrs. Fletcher took us all under her wing and treated us like we were her own family. I grew to love her and her old house with its squeaky floors and endless nooks and crannies. Calling her Grandma Fletcher and later, Grandma, seemed like the most natural thing in the world -- and so I did.
My mother remarried when I was seventeen so the old house became a quiet place again. Not as quiet, though, as it had been before we moved in. While my siblings went with my mother and her new husband, I stayed to help Grandma. I'd come up with every excuse in the world not to leave. Her health had gone downhill. I didn't want to start a new school in my senior year etc. etc. I don't think I ever voiced the main reasons. I loved her and I didn't want her to be alone.
Grandma and I had another year with Tabby. We lost our little companion not long after one of his kittens joined our household. I hadn't cried since the night Grandma handed him to me in that brown paper bag. I cried that night, though, as I held Tabby Too, renamed in honor of his sire.
I had two more years with the woman who'd changed our lives... ... and so much more!
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