A girl who is thirteen-which is hard, and difficult, and beautiful, and painful, and exhilarating.

Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-aid being ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbelly of a household is never pretty, ours no exception.

Sometimes Chris wished he could sneak a peek at the back of the book, so to speak, and see how it was all going to turn out, so that he wouldn't have to bother going through the motions.

There was no black or white. Someone who had been good her entire life could, in fact, do something evil. People were just as capable of committing murder, under the right circumstances, as any monster.

I've always sort of wondered: If everyone else's opinion is what matters, then do you ever really have one of your own?

Unlike Elise, who could discover parts of a person they didn't even know were absent, you specialized in tangible, but that, I feared, was only a matter of time.

I have always written about subjects that engage me - questions I can't answer myself. They apparently tend to be big moral and ethical issues!