{"product_id":"thrall-isbn-9781368113816","title":"Thrall","description":"\u003cb\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eThrall\u003c\/i\u003e, a young woman looking for a transformative college experience is bitten by a vampire and must team up with his other living victims to hunt him down.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLucy Easting has at last broken free from her grim home life and is ready to truly live. But her long-awaited new beginning at Rollins University isn’t what she expected. After attending the first campus party of the year, Lucy awakens the next day with a memory block…\u003ci\u003eand two puncture marks on her neck\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe tries to piece together what happened that night, but every lead brings her to another dead end. Until she receives a handwritten note from the campus radio station, inviting her to call. When she does, the host’s soothing voice over the line confirms her worst fear, and the simplest explanation of what’s happening to her: she’s turning into a vampire.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLucy teams up with the show’s host, who narrowly escaped an attack her sophomore year, and a beautiful archery champion who, while exactly Lucy’s type, is as likely to shoot her as kiss her. They believe their “friend with the cold hands” is responsible for the disappearance of several women in town, and they’ve been tracking him via the airwaves since long before Lucy arrived.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs the vampire’s sway over Lucy grows and his plans become clear, she realizes she must fight for a future of her own, or she may not have any future at all.“\u003ci\u003eThrall\u003c\/i\u003e has all the beloved dread and darkness of classic vampire tales, but also breathes life into the undead genre with a fresh and fast-paced journey of empowerment. You haven’t read a vampire story like this before.”\u003cbr\u003e—Kylie Lee Baker,\u003ci\u003e The Sunday Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eBat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A modern-day riff on \u003ci\u003eDracula\u003c\/i\u003e that takes on the monsters that hunt at the margins of society and the people who enable them. \u003ci\u003eThrall\u003c\/i\u003e is an exciting ride with a strong cast of women you’d bleed for.”\u003cbr\u003e—Trang Thanh Tran, \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003ebestselling author of \u003ci\u003eShe Is a Haunting\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Mahoney's book takes a moment of women’s terror—being unable to remember what exactly happened at a party—and forms it into a dark adventure about how your life can be devoured by a moment. A lovely, spooky story of fighting back, claiming your own life, and battling vampires.\" —Leslie J. Anderson, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Unmothers\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“An urgent and thrilling story about how we all have to fight to become our fulsome, authentic, independent selves.”—Juliet Landau, \u003ci\u003eBuffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, Bosch, Bosch: Legacy, A Place Among the Dead\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eRebecca Mahoney\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of the young adult contemporary fantasies \u003ci\u003eThe Valley and the Flood \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Memory Eater\u003c\/i\u003e, as well as the co-creator of independent audio drama \u003ci\u003eThe Bridge. \u003c\/i\u003eRebecca is a strong believer in the cathartic power of all things fantastical and frightening, and she loves writing about the care and feeding of the monsters in all of us. Her work has received starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, and Publishers Weekly - in addition, \u003ci\u003eThe Valley and the Flood \u003c\/i\u003ewas a Must-Read Title for the 2021 Massachusetts Book Award, and \u003ci\u003eThe Memory Eater \u003c\/i\u003ewas a finalist for the New England Book Award.TRANSCRIPT OF ROLLINS UNIVERSITY STUDENT RADIO STATION WVBS (“PALLAS RADIO”)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eBroadcast number: Not yet assigned\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUNKNOWN SPEAKER: My mother always said I’d get eaten alive, out here in the world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOf course, every time she said it, ‘the world’ meant a different thing. The bus stop. The crosswalk. College, eventually. When I was little, I always thought reassuring her was just a matter of proving that I was capable of navigating the wicked snares of the grocery store parking lot. But what my mother was holding onto was deeper, like it so often is. What she was afraid of was never bus stops, or crosswalks, or campuses. To her, they were all the same: a lottery wheel, always turning. And every time she or I left the house, it turned again and again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI was never afraid of the wheel. Maybe it was the fact that she’d raised me in a layer of bubble wrap, but I’ve always found it romantic that there’s no real life without chance. And if all the terrible things waiting for me – in the grocery store, at the crosswalk, or here, on our campus – if all of them came down to bad luck, then that was more comforting than scary. There’s no real malice in that. Whatever could happen to me, it would never be personal.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI tried to tell her that, once. But that was never how she saw it. To her, the wheel had intention. It had teeth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMaybe you’re thinking, bet you wish you’d listened to her now. But I think we were both right. There was something waiting for me, out here in the world. It \u003ci\u003ewas \u003c\/i\u003eby chance. It wasn’t my fault. And it was never personal.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut it had teeth all the same.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e***\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Lucy Easting, once again, took a slightly incorrect step. Her new roommate hadn’t yet requested that Lucy avoid every one of the particularly noisy floorboards in their ancient dorm room. But judging by the way she arched her shoulders like an unhappy cat, it would, at the very least, be a future suggestion.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Sorry,” Lucy said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Whitney Fielding took a carefully controlled breath. “It’s fine,” she said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLucy took a breath, and focused on the task at hand. She had to laugh. There she was, standing in her first college dorm, the very first place she had ever lived without her mother. And yet getting ready for a night out still had the same furtive feeling as it had on nights when she’d literally had to sneak out under Jillian’s nose.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e But Lucy kept the smile on her face, even as she caught the wrinkle in Whitney’s brow deepening. She had a plan. A whole host of plans, in fact – and staying civil with Whitney for the next ten months and change was one of them. Which meant that if Whitney was trying to cook up a Noble Academic vs. Frivolous Party Girl dichotomy, it was going to fall to Lucy to gracefully sidestep it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Whitney kept her back turned, facing her computer. “You’re not coming back late, right?” she asked. “I’m a light sleeper.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Lucy tied off the bust of her sunshine-yellow romper, then moved the important things from her purse to a small, light wristlet. Lipstick, pepper spray, keys. Insurance card and ID, because even if they were in the midst of a Cold War at the moment, she was still Jillian’s daughter. In the Easting house, whenever you stepped out the front door, you always made at least the basic preparations to be hit by a bus.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “I’ll be quiet,” Lucy said, not committing either way. She could respect Whitney’s laser-focus on her thesis, even if it seemed a bit early in the year to be so intense about it. But her arrival at Rollins University was the result of five years of working, careful planning, and an explosive, bridge-burning exit from the place she’d called home for her entire life. She wasn’t looking to reinstate a curfew her first week of college.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It had been a tremendous relief for Lucy to hear that she was being placed in a senior dorm. At twenty-three years old, she had little to no chance to blend in with the freshmen. And if nothing else, Whitney didn’t seem to care that she was two years younger than Lucy. If anything, Whitney seemed to think that she was the eldest member of the room, saddled with some callow, directionless youth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCase in point. “If you want my advice,” she said, “you should let your first few weeks here set the tone. Do you really want your college career to be about your social life?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “I don’t have any pre-reading for my classes,” Lucy said, which felt like a nicer answer than \u003ci\u003eyeah, a little\u003c\/i\u003e. Classes also wouldn’t start for another two days. Though that didn’t feel like the kind of argument Whitney would be sympathetic to.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Whitney glanced over her shoulder, a rare departure from her screen, and gave Lucy a rather pointed once-over. On one hand, after a five-year taste of grim adulthood, it was a bit of a novelty to be treated like a rebelling teen. On the other hand, Lucy had wavy pale blonde hair that fluffed in the humidity, and was perhaps at its peak fluffiness on this late summer Tennessee night. Her voice was a little high and a little loud in a way she knew sounded affected, though it wasn’t. She had a stick-and-poke tattoo of an asterisk on her wrist, something her high school classmate had given her at a graduation party while tipsily monologuing that it symbolized her as a ‘work in progress.’ She recognized the look of someone who wasn’t taking her seriously.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “If you wait for someone to tell you how to prepare, you’re already behind,” Whitney finally said. “Like they tell you in college coaching.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Lucy paused in the middle of zipping up her wristlet. “There’s coaching?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Whitney’s mouth thinned, as if unsurprised that Lucy didn’t know there was coaching. “Just be careful,” she said. “It’s a big campus. You can get turned around at night.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Lucy zipped her wristlet the rest of the way and accepted the kindness. Rollins itself was about as small a world as one could get at a university. The grounds, spread across a plateau on the Tennessean side of the Appalachians, may have been sprawling, but the community was tight-knit and self-contained. Lucy had to take a plane, two buses, and a college-provided shuttle to get here. That shuttle went down to the nearest town a couple times a week, and on a regular schedule on weekends. Otherwise, the students, faculty and staff never seemed to look far beyond the boundaries of campus.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e But the nights were dark up there on the mountain. The woods surrounding the Rollins grounds stretched for miles and miles. Jillian’s fears had always revolved around cities and civilization – never the wilderness. Though as she looked out the window in that moment, Lucy had a feeling her mother would find more than a few things to fear out there in the trees.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e And speak of the devil. When Lucy picked up her phone, there was a new text from her mother on screen. \u003ci\u003eCan we please talk\u003c\/i\u003e?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Lucy allowed herself one short, painful breath. One last quick squeeze of filial duty. Then she slid her phone into her pocket. She hadn’t been the one who decided they weren’t talking.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Good luck with your writing,” she said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Whitney had already long turned back to her laptop screen. “I don’t need luck,” she said airily. “I have an outline.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Lucy opened the door and stepped into the fluorescent-lit corridors of Quincey Hall. The hinge creaked behind her. The stairwell glowed ahead. Jillian’s wheel silently, feverishly spun.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e And beyond all of it, the night waited.","brand":"Hyperion Avenue","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48233781493989,"sku":"NP9781368113816","price":18.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781368113816.jpg?v=1767742558","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/thrall-isbn-9781368113816","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}