Blog Tour ~ Sundial by Catriona Ward ~ Excerpt + Giveaway
Morning all!!
dancesA dark welcome to the Blog Tour for Sundial by Catriona Ward! I am SO FREAKING excited to be part of the tour. The book sounds so awesome and right up my alley, so yes I will be reading it when I get the chance. So happy I can help promote the book.
For today’s tour stop I got an excerpt! Plus, you can join a giveaway (INT) and I got book/author information~
Let’s get this tour started, yas!~
Sundial is a new, twisty psychological horror novel from Catriona Ward, internationally bestselling author of The Last House on Needless Street.
You can’t escape what’s in your blood…
All Rob wanted was a normal life. She almost got it, too: a husband, two kids, a nice house in the suburbs. But Rob fears for her oldest daughter, Callie, who collects tiny bones and whispers to imaginary friends. Rob sees a darkness in Callie, one that reminds her too much of the family she left behind.
She decides to take Callie back to her childhood home, to Sundial, deep in the Mojave Desert. And there she will have to make a terrible choice.
Callie is worried about her mother. Rob has begun to look at her strangely, and speaks of past secrets. And Callie fears that only one of them will leave Sundial alive…
The mother and daughter embark on a dark, desert journey to the past in the hopes of redeeming their future.
Buy this book here: Amazon
About the author:
CATRIONA WARD was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in the United States, Kenya, Madagascar, Yemen, and Morocco. She studied English at the University of Oxford and later earned her master’s degree in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Ward won the August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel for her debut, The Girl from Rawblood, and again for Little Eve, making her the first woman to win the prize twice. Little Eve also won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel, and will be published by Nightfire.
Excerpt
It’s the chicken pox that makes me sure—my husband is having another affair.
I find the first blister on Annie the morning of the Goodwins’ party. She is in the bath and the window is a blue square of winter sky. The shadows of bare sycamore branches lie sharp across the white tile. Annie sits cross- legged in the tepid water. Her lips move, some secret song only for the plastic animals that bob around her. Annie won’t bathe at a temperature warmer than blood. She doesn’t like things too salty or sweet or sour, and her favorite stories are ones in which nothing happens. She is wary of extremes. I worry about her physically, my fragile second child, in a way I don’t about Callie. Annie is small for nine and people often assume she is younger. Callie worries me in other ways.
The party is the Goodwins’ January tradition. They call it their “blues banishing bash.” They’re a perky family who live next door on the left. Their two smart sons Sam and Nathan are near Callie’s age; they have in- teresting friends as well as great taste in wine and food and art. It’s the one occasion in the year our whole family looks forward to. We always have the best time at the Goodwins’.
Annie bends over and whispers to the rubber duck in her lap. The sight of her vulnerable spine, the dark paint-licks of hair clinging to her neck— these things make my throat close up hot. I don’t know what it’s like for other people but love and nausea are often indistinguishable to me.
“Arms up,” I say. Annie obeys and as she does I see it: a red mark on her upper arm. I recognize it instantly. I put my hand on her forehead, on her back. Both are warm—too warm.
Annie scratches at the rash and I enclose her hand in mine. “Stop,” I say gently. “That will make it worse, my little beet.”
She makes a small sound of dismay. “I’m not a beet,” she says. “A cauliflower, then.”
“No!”
“A rutabaga?”
“No, Mom!” But she stops scratching. She is a docile child.
I find that I am scratching my own arm in sympathy. I sometimes con- fuse my children’s bodies with my own.
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