Dangerous Neighbors: The Cover Reveal

To say that I am honored by this profoundly (to me, and I hope to you) gorgeous cover for Dangerous Neighbors would be a supreme understatement. Laura Geringer, who bought this book for Egmont USA and edited it with a whole, sustaining heart, invited art director Neil Swaab to develop themes and possibilities. Within a few days this fabulously talented artist had created a half dozen jackets of such extraordinary quality that I longed to hang them here on my office walls. The very good people of Egmont USA chose this as the final and now officially approved jacket art.

I couldn't wait to share it with you.

Nor could I wait to share this description of the book, which was written not by me but by someone else who read with great care the novel I'd worked on for five years. It's startling, as I mentioned a few days ago, to see your work through another's eyes. It teaches you.

Could any two sisters be more tightly bound together than the twins, Katherine and Anna? Yet love and fate intervene to tear them apart. Katherine's guilt and sense of betrayal leaves her longing for death, until a surprise encounter and another near catastrophe rescue her from a tragic end. Set against the magical kaleidoscope of the Philadelphia Centennial fair of 1876, National Book Award nominee Beth Kephart's book conjures the sweep and scope of a moment in history in which the glowing future of a nation is on display to the disillusioned gaze of a girl who has determined that she no longer has a future. The tale is a pulse by pulse portrait of a young heroine's crisis of faith and salvation in the face of unbearable loss.