Looking at Luca, who’s just saved my life, I can’t respond. No explanation I might offer will satisfy after all of the extraordinary things he’s just witnessed. —Ankh
AnCaela Murphy's body is a ticking bomb that only her mom can defuse. The problem: her mother is missing and presumed taken by the Skinless, bogeymen from Ankh’s home world who have been hunting her and her mother for two years--ever since they fled that world and certain death.
With help from Luca, a boy whose touch confuses and who refuses to back down, Ankh races against time to find her mother before the bomb inside of her detonates, taking her life. Tracking the Skinless across the country, the pair search for her mother and uncover the horrifying truth behind the generations-old war.
L. M. Davis loves great storytelling. She needs nothing more than a good book and a comfy chair to be happy. She was born in the south, raised in the north, and has several English degrees under her belt. She currently lives in Atlanta and is contemplating getting a cat. It will probably be black. The first two books of her Shifters Novel series, Interlopers and Posers, are available now.
I have to be honest, writing skinless was so much fun, not in small part because of the way that I could play with language while creating these characters and their voices.
I have written about teen boys, but I have never tried to put myself inside of the mind of one. Luca's voice is such a departure from anything that I've written before; it's so stream of consciousness and he kind of goes where language takes him.
Book Excerpt
Skinless: A Novel in III Parts
The guys only play with the door for a few
seconds before they give up any pretense of—I don’t know,
belonging, having a right to be standing in this neighborhood at
Ankh’s door—and basically break the door down. I hear the
wood splintering all the way over here. It sounds like
fireworks or a gunshot, something completely out of place in
November in Pilgrim’s Creek. It shatters the silence and I’m
sure at any moment people will be swarming the streets wondering,
like I am, what the hell is going on, but the doors stay
shut. Ankh’s door swings open into blackness and everything
is slow-mo as they tumble inside like cockroaches.
My heart isn’t moving or it’s pounding too hard
and I’m frozen. Ankh’s in there, those guys clearly aren’t
the friendly neighborhood watch, and where the hell is
everybody.
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