ANGEL THIEVES
by
KATHI APPELT
Young Adult / Magical Realism / Historical / Contemporary
Publisher: Atheneum / Caitlyn Dlouhy Books
Date of Publication: March 12, 2019
Number of Pages: 336
***Scroll down for the giveaway!***
***Scroll down for the giveaway!***
Sixteen-year-old Cade Curtis is an angel thief. After his mother’s family rejected him for being born out of wedlock, he and his dad moved to the apartment above a local antique shop. The only payment the owner Mrs. Walker requests: marble angels, stolen from graveyards, for her to sell for thousands of dollars to collectors. But there’s one angel that would be the last they’d ever need to steal; an angel, carved by a slave, with one hand open and one hand closed. If only Cade could find it… Zorra, a young ocelot, watches the bayou rush past her yearningly. The poacher who captured and caged her has long since lost her, and Zorra is getting hungrier and thirstier by the day. Trapped, she only has the sounds of the bayou for comfort—but it tells her help will come soon. Before Zorra, Achsah, a slave, watched the very same bayou with her two young daughters. After the death of her master, Achsah is free, but she’ll be damned if her daughters aren’t freed with her. All they need to do is find the church with an angel with one hand open and one hand closed… In a masterful feat, National Book Award Honoree Kathi Appelt weaves together stories across time, connected by the bayou, an angel, and the universal desire to be free.
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BRAZOS BOOKSTORE ◆ BLUE WILLOW BOOKSHOP ◆ BOOK PEOPLE AMAZON ◆ BARNES AND NOBLE ◆ INDIEBOUND
BRAZOS BOOKSTORE ◆ BLUE WILLOW BOOKSHOP ◆ BOOK PEOPLE AMAZON ◆ BARNES AND NOBLE ◆ INDIEBOUND
Angel
Thieves, Part One
Guest
Post by Kathi Appelt
This book took me a full three
years to get it to its final incarnation, and honestly, if I had another week,
I’d probably tweak it again. My editor, the wondrous Caitlyn Dlouhy, basically
had to rip it out of my grubby little hands. “Kathi, seriously, we have to send
it to the printer NOW!” Alas!
Some history: The first draft
came fast. I got it all down in about six weeks, which is something of a record
for me. I’m normally a fairly slow writer. You could say that it was the
proverbial shitty first draft. There was nothing lovely or magical or
enchanting about it whatsoever. What it had going for it was “possibility.” And
you’re probably thinking, really? Six weeks? Okay, true confessions: there were
a couple of intertwined ideas that I had been mulling over for years, and in
that initial burst of writing, those two ideas just kept eating at me.
The first came to me as a
question—what does it look like to have the kind of faith that you would risk
everything, including your life, and the life of others, for the cause of
faith? Here in my part of the world, I’ve met people whose faith is so deep,
their belief is so solid, that they are convinced that any harm that comes
their way is part of a bigger plan, and also that Jesus or God or Allah or
however you want to describe a Higher Power, will take care of you. I call
these folks “sweet believers,” because that’s how I see them: sweet in their
beliefs. And I mean it in a very complimentary way.
I will be the first to say
that I’m not a religious person. However, I do believe that one can be a person
of faith, without being tied to any particular religion. But that wasn’t what I
was pondering here. Instead, I wanted to write about a girl who lived her life
based upon her sweet belief in all-things-good. Moreover, what if it was her
experience of her church that guided her?
The second idea came from a
moment I had several years earlier. One cold, rainy day, I accompanied my
90-year old grandmother to the graveside service of her younger brother. It was
a tiny gathering at the old Washington Cemetery in Houston, TX. I come from a
very long line—seven generations in fact—of Houstonians, the earliest of whom
arrived back when Texas a republic.
The service ended, hugs were
delivered, and we got back in the car to head to her house. But as we drove
through the cemetery, I noticed that something was “off.” It was so unsettling
that I felt compelled to make another loop through the graveyard. What I
noticed was that, without any exceptions, every angel had been decapitated. All
their heads were missing.
I was haunted by it, so much
in fact that I asked my husband, Ken, to drive to Houston with me to take a
photo.
Now, the Washington Cemetery is
old. It’s been there for a very long time. It’s likely that some of those heads
were lost to lightning, or a tree fall, or a high wind. But it’s more likely
that someone, maybe someone like the boy in my poem, stole them. And that led
me to investigate the very lucrative black
market in stolen cemetery statuary. Yes, it really is a thing.
All of this led me to ask this
question: what would it be like for a boy who has a dark secret to fall for a
girl who is fundamentally good? How could that possibly play out? Would there
ultimately be any hope for a relationship like that? What would it look like?
From those initial questions,
I created Soleil Broussard (Sweet Believer) and Cade Curtis (Angel Thief).
They form the contemporary
timeline of the novel. There is another timeline that is set in pre-Civil War
Houston. I want to tell you about that too, but right now, I have to feed the
cats. Stay tuned.
PRAISE FOR ANGEL THIEVES:
Spiritual, succinct, and emotionally gripping.
-- School Library Journal
A heartfelt love letter to Houston that acknowledges the bad parts of its history while uplifting the good. -- BCBB
Shows the best and worst sides of humanity and underscores the powerful force of the bayou, which both holds and erases secrets.
-- Publishers Weekly
Narrative strands are like tributaries that begin as separate entities but eventually merge into a single thematic connection: that love, whether lost or found, is always powerful. -- Horn Book
Richly drawn and important. -- Booklist, starred review
She has two grown children and lives in College Station, Texas, with her husband and their six cats. She serves as a faculty member at Vermont College of Fine Arts in their MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults program.
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SEPTEMBER 24-OCTOBER 4, 2019
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