House of Hearts

(Hardback)

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Description

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 thetrauma 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 cluethat leads her to theHouse of Hearts retreat center run by the mysterious Sky.At House of Hearts, Izzy meets an intriguing musician named Ever Fontana andfor 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.

Izzys 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, aboutherself.

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 Heartsis 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 loves ancient curse,which is the sacrifice that every god demands. For sometimes delusions arent delusions at all and if we think were chasing ghosts, were 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 isnt myth that makes us, its the other way around. And the only path past pain cuts straight through hell. You simply must read this book.

Jill Alexander Essbaum, author ofHausfrau

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 ofThe 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 ofThe Butterfly Lampshade

Author Bio

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 Publishers Weekly, among others.