Dangerous Neighbors Excerpt

It is February, 1876, an unusually warm year in Philadelphia. The Schuylkill has at last frozen over. The skaters are out:

From where they stand, the sisters see a game being played out on the river—two groups of boys whooshing a silver pail between them with sticks. The girls and women tend to hover near the river’s shore, or drift out farther, west and north. One girl in a gray-blue coat is sailing out and fast away on a diagonal, her coattails lifting up and flapping behind, revealing a skirt made entirely of summer yellow. With her shoulders pressed forward and her blades pushing her on, she seems intent on vanishing.

“Where do you suppose she’s going?” asks Anna.

“Perhaps to Birdsboro,” Katherine guesses, as they move across the frozen earth toward the frozen ice. “Or Valley Forge.” But just as Katherine predicts a long journey for the skater, the girl performs a miraculous pivot and begins to sail toward the shore, lifting one leg behind her as she does and holding herself up like an L, on an assured leg, causing one of the boys with the stick and the scarf to stop and stare. He hollers for her then and others do, too, and she remains intrepid above the steady foot on the frozen body of the Schuylkill. There are cheers. Applause that would be so much louder if it weren’t for the muffs and gloves.

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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.

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Dangerous Neighbors

Yesterday, returning at last to the Centennial novel, I struggled to reclaim my footing—to go back in time to 1876. Nothing rushes writing. No short cuts can be taken. I had to sit again, settle in again, to the clatter on Broad Street, to the buildings, no longer there, to the strange interiors of spectacle buildings that turned Philadelphia into a near-circus for a year.

The vendors are out, roasting their chestnuts. There is a hawk with blood-colored feathers on the parapet of a slanted roof.

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Historical Novel, Excerpt

The rain still sliding down and down here, the house quiet. I work on the historical novel in this stillness, an excerpt from which I post here today. It is 1876, August, Philadelphia. William, Ma, and Francis are just barely getting by, but Francis, who will be murdered by a policeman later, has a gift for the remarkable. In this scene he has caught a bobolink by the Schuylkill River and brought it back home in a magenta hatbox, an act of theater and, also, generosity.

The sun still at his back, the blue-steamed sky as his frame, Francis stood in the doorway and slid the lid of the box back just wide enough for the three to see, until Ma, catching her breath, said, “And such a derring-do he is.” There was a penny toss game getting under way across the street—the toughs, already distracted. There was a milk cart trotting by, a tabby in the gutter swatting fleas, and the sun had been high all day, heat was the mood, heat was August in Philadelphia, and the kitchen stunk of bleach. William had been upstairs reading Moby Dick. He still felt out to sea.

“He’s a good bird,” Francis said, and now, like an illusionist with a practiced trick, he closed the door behind him and freed the box of its lid—such a strange box, William thought, so like Francis to be out there toting a livid, bigheaded color. Into his free hand, Francis scooped the bobolink and let the bird stretch its one wing and settle, let the bird flaunt the bright coal-blackness of its feathers, the drifts of snow white across his small, proud back, the straw-colored cap on his head. The bird cranked its head right, and blinked.

“Come on, bird,” Francis encouraged. “You show Ma what you’re made of now.” William could see the pulsing heart in the bird’s elastic chest, the cinders of fear in his glassine eyes, and Francis—understanding, sympathetic, a genius with living things, living being Francis’s genius—began to whistle until the bird gave up its song, which wasn’t shrill and wasn’t haunting, just a daylight summer song.

“He’s a soprano,” Ma said, after awhile.

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