About The Splendor Falls

Be sure to ENTER TO WIN one of Rosemary Clement-Moore’s books.  She’s giving away 2 copies of The Splendor Falls and 2 of Highway to Hell!

For more information about Rosemary and her books, visit her web site.

Sylvie Davis is a ballerina who can’t dance. A broken leg ended her career, but Sylvie’s pain runs deeper. What broke her heart was her father’s death, and what’s breaking her spirit is her mother’s remarriage—a union that’s only driven an even deeper wedge into their already tenuous relationship.

Uprooting her from her Manhattan apartment and shipping her to Alabama is her mother’s solution for Sylvie’s unhappiness. Her father’s cousin is restoring a family home in a town rich with her family’s history. And that’s where things start to get shady. As it turns out, her family has a lot more history than Sylvie ever knew. More unnerving, though, are the two guys that she can’t stop thinking about. Shawn Maddox, the resident golden boy, seems to be perfect in every way. But Rhys—a handsome, mysterious foreign guest of her cousin’s—has a hold on her that she doesn’t quite understand.

Then she starts seeing things. Sylvie’s lost nearly everything—is she starting to lose her mind as well?

From Publishers Weekly

Seventeen-year-old Sylvie has recently lost both her father and her nascent career as a ballerina. Sent to visit family in Alabama during her newly remarried mother’s honeymoon, Sylvie grapples not only with dislocation and grief, but with hallucinations—in Central Park, in the airport and in her family’s antebellum mansion, Bluestone Hill—that she cannot control or explain. Her cousin Paula, an old-school steel magnolia, is no comfort, but Sylvie finds warmth in the competing attentions of theTom Sawyeresque Shawn Maddox and Rhys Griffith, a visitor from Wales with secrets of his own. As Sylvie learns more about Shawn, Rhys and the history of Bluestone Hill, she finds strength to understand her family’s past and her own unsettling but hopeful future. Sylvie’s voice is sharp and articulate, and Clement-Moore (the Maggie Quinn: Girl vs. Evil series) anchors the story in actual locations and history, offering au courant speculations about the nature of ghosts and magic. Her ear for both adolescent bitchery and sweetness remains sure, and her ability to write realistic, edgy dialogue without relying on obscenity or stereotype is a pleasure. Ages 14–up. (Sept.)

About Hightway to Hell:

Maggie Quinn was expecting to find plenty of trouble with Lisa over Spring Break. Give a girl a bikini, a beachfront hotel, and an absent boyfriend, and it’s as good as a road map to the dark side. But Maggie doesn’t have to go looking for trouble. Trouble has started looking for her. One dead cow and a punctured gas tank later, she and Lisa are stuck in Dulcina, Texas—a town so small that it has an owner. And lately life in this small town hasn’t been all that peaceful. An eerie predator is stalking the ranchland.

Everyone in town has a theory, but not even Maggie’s psychic mojo can provide any answers. And the longer the girls are stranded, the more obvious it becomes that something is seriously wrong. Only no one—not even Maggie’s closest ally—wants to admit that they could have been forced on a detour down the highway to hell.

School Library Journal

Gr 7 Up

Maggie Quinn has psychic ability and a history of fighting demons and other evil manifestations, as proven in Hell Week (2008) and Prom Dates from Hell (2007, both Delacorte). She and her D&D-loving friend Lisa, who is a practitioner of spells and magic, are on a spring-break trip to south Texas when their jeep slams into a slaughtered cow on the highway. Stranded in a small town while the vehicle is being repaired, they meet many of the locals, some of whom are convinced that el chupacabra , a legendary evil creature, has been released from the underground and is killing their livestock. Doña Isabel, the wealthy matriarch of the area, seems to know something, but isn’t talking; her handsome grandson, Zeke, does not believe in “Ol’ Chupy,” but he is forced to face the truth when humans as well as cattle are attacked by the demon creature. Maggie and Lisa are highly likable and genuine college freshmen, and when they spring into action against the terrifying creature, the adventure really takes off. The background information on the evil being is logical and believable, and the two belief systems of Catholicism and Hispanic magical culture sustain a respectful coexistence. This story flows quickly with thrills, chills, and a first-rate mystery.-Jake Pettit, Thompson Valley High School, Loveland, CO