What if you had the power to heal your broken family? To bring back a lost loved one? Jessie and Jared are about to find out, in a place called Angel Falls, where an ancient and mysterious power waits to fulfill their deepest wishes–with dangerous consequences. Fifteen-year-old Jessie Reed would do anything to keep her parents together. When her father inherits an old house from his elderly and mysterious Cousin Dorothy, Jessie accompanies him to the seaport village of Beauport, while her mother stays behind in New York City. Fearing for her parents’ marriage and unnerved by the prospect of spending her summer in “a dead woman’s house”, Jessie strikes out on her own and stumbles across the isolated trails of Angel Falls, a wild and beautiful place that holds the ruins of a three-hundred-year-old town with a strange history. There she encounters Jared Younger, a sixteen-year-old local boy who considers these forbidden woods his own.
Jared is caretaker for his father, an artist crippled by depression. Jared feels powerless to save his father–until a series of unexplainable events brings him face to face with a power he never knew he had. Jared’s teacher, Chris Delany offers to help him understand and control the strange thing that’s happening to him–but are Delany’s motives as pure as they seem? Or, as Jessie suspects, does Delany have a secret agenda of his own that puts Jared in danger?
Together, Jessie and Jared discover that the truth is far more dangerous than they could have imagined and that they must work together to save their families and uncover the strange secret of Angel Falls.
WINNER OF The 2023 Whippoorwill Award!!!
The Whippoorwill Award is given to the best books written for YA and middle grade readers that authentically and complexly represent rural people and places.
Available on Amazon as paperback, hard cover, Kindle and now Audiobook narrated by Kirby Heyborne!
Praise
“Well-told story!”
“What a lovely horror it is to enter Angel Falls where the air drips with fog, and the tender heart of human desire becomes a fetid root of loss. What a balm it is to go there and heal old wounds, without risk, through the gift of this well-told story!”
—M. Rickert author of The Shipbuilder of Bellfairie and Lucky Girl, How I Became a Horror Writer: A Krampus Story
“The best novel in the genre I’ve ever read”
“Angel Falls is a touching, tension filled young adult novel that had this old guy engrossed from start to finish. The authors absolutely nail the emotional angst of two teenaged characters fraught with familial and supernatural terrors, all while developing deep feelings for one another. When it comes to supernatural young adult fiction, Angel Falls is the best novel in the genre I’ve ever read. It’s that good.”
—Tony Tremblay – Bram Stoker nominated author of The Moore House, and Do Not Weep For Me
“I couldn’t put it down”
“Fast-paced and compelling, Angel Falls is a page-turner with well-drawn characters and a terrific supernatural mystery propelling a story that is, at its core, about love, loss and the inevitability of change. I couldn’t put it down.”
––Lynda Rucker, author of You’ll Know When You Get There
“Readers…will be captivated”
“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. So goes the proverb. But what if you discovered you could make your wishes real? Jessie and Jared struggle to protect the things they hold most dear. When they find Angel Falls may grant them that power, they’re forced to confront the effects their desires have on those they love. Teen and adult readers alike will be captivated, as I was, when mysteries of the past and secrets of the present collide in this eerie story of family, friendship, and the supernatural.”
–– Patricia Lillie, author of The Cuckoo Girls
“Full of…tender magic”
“Angel Falls is a novel full of exquisite mysteries, tender magic, and family secrets. A generational saga that promises to heal the wounds of the past.”
–– Christopher Barzak, Shirley Jackson award-winning author of Wonders of the Invisible World