When We Were Animals
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
Nobody knew why, but when the boys and girls reached a certain age the parents locked themselves up in their houses, and the teenagers ran wild...
Lumen Fowler knows she is different. While the rest of her peers are falling beneath the sway of her community’s darkest rite of passage, she resists.
For Lumen has a secret. Her mother never ‘breached’ and she knows she won’t either. But as she investigates her town’s strange traditions and unearths stories from her family’s past, she soon realises she may not know herself – or her wild side – at all...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lumen, the narrator of this disturbing fable from Gaylord (Hummingbirds) that explores the eternal tension between reason and the irrational, grows up with her widowed father in a small Appalachia-like town inhospitable to outsiders. During each full moon, the town's teenagers "breach"; that is, they run naked and wild, fight with each other, and have sex in the woods. A late bloomer, she moves from childhood into adolescence after her peers; Lumen at first resolves never to breach, but as her hormones begin to stir, she finds herself torn between seemingly good Peter Meechum and wicked Blackhat Roy, who both debases and fascinates her. Gaylord, who has written two horror novels under the pen name Alden Bell, spikes his fitfully lovely language with noisome noir detail. In the end, some readers may regret that Lumen appears to accept that humanity is "a shameful and secret nastiness," while she misses the honest simplicity of genuine human emotion, too deep for logical explanation.
