House of Hearts

by Francesca Lia Block

Overview

Izzy Ames lives with her high school sweetheart, Cyrus Rivera, in the Salton Sea. They cling to each other and to their close friends Nephy and Seth to cope with the trauma of their pasts. Until the morning Izzy awakes to find Cyrus has vanished.

When she realizes no one will help, Izzy takes matters into her own hands and decides to search for Cyrus alone. After weeks of looking for him, she discovers a clue that leads her to the House of Hearts retreat center run by the mysterious Sky.  At House of Hearts, Izzy meets an intriguing musician named Ever Fontana and for a moment she is able to forget the pain of her past. But when new clues about Cyrus’ disappearance surface, Izzy must go down into the dark to find the truth.

Izzy’s quest will take her into a world of sexuality, madness, and violence, where she will discover life-changing secrets not only about Cyrus but, ultimately, about herself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644282625
Publisher:	Rare Bird Books
Publication date:	07/12/2022
Pages:	232
Sales rank:	1,127,320
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Francesca Lia Block is the bestselling author of more than twenty-five widely-translated books of fiction, non-fiction, short stories and poetry, and she has also written various essays, reviews and screenplay adaptations of her work. She has received the Spectrum Award, the Phoenix Award, the ALA Rainbow Award and the 2005 Margaret A. Edwards Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as praise from the New York Times Book Review, Time, NPR, LA Times, and Publisher’s Weekly, among others.

Editorial Reviews

"House of Hearts is as hot, strange, and heartbreaking as the Mojave at high noon. Compulsively readable, with a heroine whose voice we need now, this is a novel that will teach you how to survive.”

—Lisa Locascio​ Nighthawk​, ​​author of ​Open Me

"House of Hearts…is remarkably beautiful, unpredictably strange, and startling in a way that is impossible to anticipate. [Her themes tread familiar ground: the traumas that roil through a body in grief; the darkly unsafe sorceries that bedevil a soul into being; and the burden of love’s ancient curse, which is the sacrifice that every god demands. For sometimes delusions aren’t delusions at all and if we think we’re chasing ghosts, we’re wrong. The ghosts are hunting us. ]The wisdom of this novel is absolute. What hurts is also what heals. The blessing is the wound. It isn’t myth that makes us, it’s the other way around.  And the only path past pain cuts straight through hell. You simply must read this book.” 

—Jill Alexander Essbaum, author of Hausfrau

“The desert is alive with story, with terror, with myth, with wonder, and Francesca Lia Block has planted a House of Hearts there. Come in if you dare, but you might not make it back out." 

—Stephen Graham Jones, author of The Only Good Indians

"A lushly sensory page-turner that will satisfy Block fans and create new ones— I was swept up in the story but also paused, with pleasure, to savor the way this writer captures, again and again, the overwhelmingly gorgeous and frightening Southern California landscape." 
—Aimee Bender, author of The Butterfly Lampshade

From the Publisher