As Simple as Snow

As Simple as Snow

by Gregory Galloway
As Simple as Snow

As Simple as Snow

by Gregory Galloway

Paperback(Reprint)

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Overview

"Anna Cayne had moved here in August, just before our sophomore year in high school, but by February she had, one by one, killed everyone in town."

Anna—who prefers to be called Anastasia—is a slightly spooky and complicated high school girl with a penchant for riddles, Houdini tricks, and ghost stories. She spends much of her time writing obituaries for every living person in town. She is unlike anyone the narrator has ever known, and they make an unlikely, though happy, pair.

Then a week before Valentine's Day, Anna disappears, leaving behind only a dress placed neatly near a hole in the frozen river, and a string of unanswered questions. Desperate to find her, or at least to comprehend what happened and why, the narrator begins to reconstruct the past five months. And soon the fragments of curious events, intimate conversations, secrets, and peculiar letters (and the anonymous messages that continue to arrive) coalesce into haunting and surprising revelations that may implicate friends, relatives, and even Anna herself.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780147515810
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Publication date: 04/21/2015
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 352
Sales rank: 1,140,834
Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d)
Age Range: 14 - 17 Years

About the Author

Gregory Galloway has an MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He lives in New Jersey.

Read an Excerpt

Good-bye to Everyone

Anna Cayne had moved here in August, just before our sophomore year in high school, but by February she had, one by one, killed everyone in town. She didn't do it all by herself—I helped with a few, including my best friend—but still, it was no small accomplishment, even if it was a small town.
  She captured all of these lives and deaths in fourteen black-jacketed composition notebooks. By the time she has finished, there were more than 1,500 obituaries, on just under 2,800 handwritten pages. The lives she wrote about were real, all true, but the deaths were fictions she invented, an average of around eight a day. "I'm not predicting the future," she said, "but it's only a matter of time before everyone catches up to me."
  She had known things about people, or had discovered them—the secrets and private information that showed up in her notebooks were things that people who had spent their entire lives in our town didn't know. The funny thing is, during the months when the bodies were piling up in the imagination of Anna Cayne, I don't think a single person actually died in town; it was the longest drought for the funeral home that anyone could remember.
  The obituaries were private; her friends and a few other people knew that Anna was working on them, but besides me, I don't believe anyone else was allowed to read them. She must have started the project on her very first day in town, the day I saw her sitting on the front lawn of her new home, writing in one of her notebooks as the rest of us stood with her parents, watching their belongings parade from thelong yellow truck into the house. And after she had written the last page almost seven months later, she was gone.
  Maybe.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"This strange tale manages to creep under your skin, and to stay there for some time."—People

"The writing is compelling; the pace as swift as that water churning under the ice."—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

"A story about young love, suffused with mystery and magic . . . an absorbing read."—The Des Moines Register

"This rich, complex puzzle is the work of a talented author."—Publishers Weekly

"An intriguing debut."—School Library Journal

"Oddly mesmerizing . . . it's teasing foreshadowings and forbodings make it hard to forget."—Booklist

"Galloway does an excellent job of building suspense."—Library Journal

"One of the best books I've read in a long, long time."-Kaye Gibbons

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