Black Flowers, White Lies

Her father died before she was born, but Ella Benton knows they have a supernatural connection. Since her mother discourages these beliefs, Ella keeps her cemetery visits secret. But she may not be the only one with secrets. Ella’s mother might be lying about how Dad died sixteen years ago. Newfound evidence points to his death in a psychiatric hospital, not as a result of a tragic car accident as her mother always claimed. After a lifetime of just the two of them, Mom suddenly feels like a stranger.

When a handprint much like the one Ella left on her father’s tombstone mysteriously appears on the bathroom mirror, at first she wonders if Dad is warning her of danger as he did once before. If it’s not a warning, could her new too-good-to-be-true boyfriend be responsible for the strange occurrences? Or maybe it’s the grieving building superintendent whose dead daughter strongly resembles Ella? As the unexplained events become more frequent and more sinister, Ella becomes terrified about whoor whatmight harm her.

Soon the evidence points to someone else entirely: Ella herself. What if, like her father, she’s suffering from a breakdown? In this second novel from award-winning author Yvonne Ventresca, Ella desperately needs to find answers, no matter how disturbing the truth might be.

Yvonne Ventresca is a young adult author who likes writing about situations that scare her.Pandemic (Sky Pony Press, 2014), her debut novel, won a Crystal Kite Award from the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators in 2015. Yvonne’s other credits include a short story in the YA dystopian anthologyPrep for Doom and two un-frightening nonfiction books. Besides writing, she enjoys Isshinryu karate, which she’s studied for the last ten years. Yvonne resides with her family in Chatham, New Jersey.