Excerpt and Giveaway: Plus One by Elizabeth Fama

Published: April 8th, 2014

Description:

Divided by day and night and on the run from authorities, star-crossed young lovers unearth a sinister conspiracy in this compelling romantic thriller.

Seventeen-year-old Soleil Le Coeur is a Smudge—a night dweller prohibited by law from going out during the day. When she fakes an injury in order to get access to and kidnap her newborn niece—a day dweller, or Ray—she sets in motion a fast-paced adventure that will bring her into conflict with the powerful lawmakers who order her world, and draw her together with the boy she was destined to fall in love with, but who is also a Ray.

Set in a vivid alternate reality and peopled with complex, deeply human characters on both sides of the day-night divide, Plus One is a brilliantly imagined drama of individual liberty and civil rights, and a fast-paced romantic adventure story.

EXCERPT

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At that moment the trees exploded. The starlings, on a mysterious mass whim, burst from their perches like thousands of synchronized windup toys. They formed a zeppelin-size cloud that seemed to levitate into the sky, swirling as each bird adjusted instantaneously to the smallest movement of the bird next to it. The cloud shimmered, flashing black and silver in the light, twisting on itself, blowing above us like a plume of smoke on the wind. D’Arcy and I, and every other person on the prairie with us, turned our heads and swiveled our bodies, following the path of the birds.

“A murmuration!” someone shouted.

Back and forth the cloud of starlings swirled: now as concentrated as a tornado, then unfurling like a massive flag in the wind, finally rolling in on itself into a tube, and a ball, becoming blacker and smaller in its density, then breaking apart into two midair groupings and shape-shifting seamlessly together again. The cloud ebbed and flowed through the vast sky—wheeling like a wave cut loose from the ocean, pouring over the farmland across the road—and suddenly disappeared high above the trees, only to reappear just as quickly, swooping back over the prairie, so low over our heads that D’Arcy and I ducked instinctively, my hair whipping in the downdraft they generated, their wings beating like the rush of the surf, deafening as they passed. I screamed involuntarily, my chest bursting with the marvel, the joy, the miracle of nature. It gave me the sort of exhilarating edge of fear that I had whenever I experienced something astonishingly beautiful. The mass of birds flew up, straight up, headed for orbit, and then curled and plummeted in a limp waterfall of tiny bodies behind the trees, falling straight toward the ground into utter silence.

The people around us laughed in overt wonder. I was gasping for air, and my heart was beating frantically in my chest. D’Arcy’s face fairly glowed.

I shoved him in the shoulders, making him lose his balance, blurting, “No fair!” and then caught him before he fell. We steadied each other— I grabbed his elbows, he held my waist— as I said, forgetting to conceal a smile that was probably transparent with adoration, “You just had to top my Milky Way, didn’t you?”

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About the author:

Elizabeth Fama is the author of Plus One (FSG, 2014), Monstrous Beauty (FSG, 2012), a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults selection and Odyssey Award honor winner, and Overboard (Cricket Books, 2002), an ALA Best Books for Young Adults. She is represented by Sara Crowe of Harvey Klinger, Inc.

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