The town of Glory has a dark side, as Marsden knows all too well. Along the Indigo River, a bed-and-breakfast serves as a front for a brothel, where Marsden's mother works as a prostitute. And her father? Well, he was one of the many suicides to turn up in a covert by the river. Marsden, desperate to avoid her mother's life, plans to escape Glory with her little sister, but to do that she needs money, and that means skimming arching the bodies of the Indigo River suicides for money. It's skimming that leads her to meet Jude, a boy whose brother was one of the suicides. It's not long before they begin a tenuous friendship that slowly becomes more, but both their families harbor dangerous secrets that might tear them apart. Most of the novel is a slow burn th the mystery and Marsden and Jude's relationship d the pacing can lag because of it, especially early on. But for teens in search of strange premises and moody, atmospheric narratives, this is a safe bet.

Love, mystery, and tragedy in a small town with a haunted past. Marsden does not want to be a prostitute. She and her sister manage to lie low, working in the kitchen of the boardinghouse that fronts as iron-fisted Nina's brothel. Marsden is multiracial Chinese and looks strikingly similar to her mother, who provides exotic diversions for Nina's largely white clientele. Marsden's desperation to protect her younger sister from the debauchery they live among leads her to skim cash from dead bodies—and in this dark and mysterious tale, dead bodies abound. The covert—the neglected wooded land that is her birthright—captures the imagination of the lost and hopeless. Local folklore and a history of bloodshed lead many to believe that earth from the covert, along the Indigo River, contains magical powers of absolution. Suicide victims with cash in their pockets are a common occurrence in the covert, where Marsden runs into Jude, a boy from school who is also "as mixed as she was, except black to her Chinese." Jude is there to look for clues to his older brother's suicide, and Marsden reluctantly agrees to help. The story builds on eerie developments and real-world fears as Nina blackmails Marsden to turn her first trick. The book is captivating and unearthly, with beautifully poignant writing and elegantly drawn characters. However, resolutions are disappointingly mundane, leaving readers craving more poetry and magic. Fans of fabulism will love this book but may find the denouement unsatisfyingly prosaic. (Fabulism. 12-16)

In this bleak tale from Chapman (Dualed), high school junior Marsden Eldridge is desperate to escape her hometown of Glory, along with her younger sister, Wynn. To do so, she skims money from the bodies she finds in the nearby covert, purportedly cursed property owned by her family-it draws people from miles around to kill themselves there. The sisters live in a brothel masquerading as a boarding house, where their half-Chinese mother works as a prostitute. Soon, Marsden will be forced into prostitution to help repay her late father-s debts. Then Marsden-s classmate Jude Ambrose shows up, looking for answers about his older brother-s suicide. Marsden and Jude, both mixed-race outsiders, start falling for each other, but Marsden has secrets she fears having uncovered and the mystery of her father-s death to solve. Overlapping subplots abound, though Marsden-s fixation on speaking with the dead is an extraneous one without much traction. The setup is enticingly eerie, but Chapman-s lyrical writing is weighed down by a slow-moving plot. Ages 13-up. Agent: Victoria Marini, Irene Goodman Literary. (Mar.)