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It doesn't occur to Nore to take the dream-warning seriously. Her new stepmother and stepbrother seem nice. But why does Nore feel so uneasy around them?



Maybe she should have listened . . .

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Gabe did not, after my initial morning at Shadow Grove, express any further interest in accompanying us to Merveille. Instead, he seemed suddenly to have developed an all-consuming passion for fishing. Through a classified ad in the Sunday paper, he bought himself a secondhand rowboat with an outboard motor and moored it in the rushes across the road from us. From then on, we hardly saw him. Every morning, he would disappear with a fuel can and his fishing gear immediately after breakfast and would reappear around dinnertime, sometimes bringing back a few bass, but, more often than not, empty-handed. Once, Lisette surprised me by suggesting that he take me with him. "Don't you think that it's time that you showed Nore some of the scenery along the river?" she asked him. "It's like a whole foreign world back there, so green and lovely. I'm sure she's never seen anything quite like it." Gabe shot his mother a quick, dark glance and shook his head. "Not yet," he said. "There's plenty of time for that. We've got all summer." "Sometimes it's better not to put things off too long," said Lisette. "You never know what problems may arise if you do." "I said, later," Gabe told her brusquely. "I'm just not ready yet." He turned on his heel and stalked angrily out of the room. That evening, he didn't come home until after dark. The rest of us had long since finished eating, and Josie and I were out in the kitchen in the process of loading the dishwasher. Gabe entered the room without a word of greeting, served himself from the soup pot on the back of the stove, and left again, still without speaking. A moment later, I heard the sound of his feet crashing hard upon the stairs and realized that he was taking his supper up to his room. "Why is he acting this way?" I asked Josie, not attempting to conceal my hurt and bewilderment. "He seemed to like me well enough when I first got here. What have I done to make him so angry now?" "You haven't done anything," said Josie. "Gabe gets like this when he's under a lot of pressure. He's got things on his mind, that's all." "What sort of things?" I asked her, and then--as a possible explanation occurred to me--"Could it be that girl he used to go with, the one who gave him the herbs he uses in the anisette? He said that she lived in a cottage over by the river. Do you suppose he might be seeing her again?" "No," Josie said with certainty. "Felicité is gone. She and Gabe broke up a long time ago." "Maybe she's changed her mind and come back," I suggested. If that were the case, it would explain so many things--the long hours Gabe spent away from home each day, the often nonexistent catch after a whole day's fishing, his resistance to his mother's request that he take me with him on one of his excursions on the river. "That's impossible," said Josie. "Felicité's dead." "Dead!" For some reason, I reacted with as much shock to that statement as if I had known Gabe's former girlfriend personally. "When did that happen? Did Gabe just find out about it? No wonder he's been acting so distant and preoccupied." "It didn't just happen. Gabe's known about it for years," Josie said. "He wasn't all that upset by it, even back when it happened. By then, the two of them had been broken up for ages." "He wasn't upset by it!" I repeated incredulously. "But, Jo, he had to be! Maybe they weren't still going together, but to have somebody your own age, someone you'd once really cared about, die--" "It happens all the time, Nore," Josie said calmly "Friends grow away from you, and they do die. That's why it's better not to get too attached to people. When you do, all that happens is that you end up sad." Lying in bed that night, I thought back upon that statement and could hardly believe that the child had actually made it. Excerpted from Locked in Time by Lois Duncan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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School Library Journal Review

Gr 7 Up-When Nore Robbins joins her father's new family in Louisiana, she discovers that the Cajun- and Creole-steeped history of her new stepfamily and the house at Shadow Grove are not what they seem in Lois Duncan's suspenseful novel (Little, Brown, 1985). Discomfited by the thrall that her preternaturally beautiful stepmother has over her dad, Nore begins to suspect that Lisette and her two children have a secret they're willing to do almost anything to keep: they are older-much older-than they appear and are locked in time. As cracks begin to surface in the seeming perfection of their idyllic existence, Nore is drawn into a web of deceit and the supernatural. The characters are not fully drawn, but Duncan keeps the plot racing along and creates a ton of atmosphere with the backdrop of a small town and a weathered plantation house. Jaselyn Blanchard does a fine job with the soft Louisiana accents, giving each character a unique voice. Some significant revisions from the original 1985 publication have been made to bring the story into the more technologically savvy 21st century, but it still feels a bit dated. Fans of romantic suspense and thrillers will probably enjoy this story.-Charli Osborne, Oxford Public Library, MI (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

When Nore Robbins spends the summer with her father and new stepmother on their Louisiana plantation, she is caught in a living nightmare. (Jl 85)

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Lois Duncan was born on April 28, 1934 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. At the age of 13, her first story was published in the magazine Calling All Girls. As a senior in high school, she won Seventeen magazine's annual short-story contest. She continued to write for magazines after getting married and having children. She entered her young adult manuscript Debutante Hill in Dodd, Mead and Company's Seventeenth Summer Literary Contest and earned the grand prize, which was $1000 and a book contract. That first title was published in 1958. She published several young adult novels at that time including Love Song for Joyce and A Promise for Joyce, both under the pseudonym Lois Kerry.

After her first marriage ended in divorce, she wrote freelance magazine articles and taught in the journalism department at the University of New Mexico. After she married for the second time, she started writing books again. Her young adult novels included Ransom, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Killing Mr. Griffin, Night Terrors, Stranger with My Face, Don't Look Behind You, and The Twisted Window.

She also wrote works for younger readers including Silly Mother, The Circus Comes Home: When the Greatest Show on Earth Rose the Rails, Hotel for Dogs, News for Dogs, and Movie for Dogs. Her best-known non-fiction book, Who Killed My Daughter?: The True Story of a Mother's Search for Her Daughter's Murderer, is about her family's experiences following the murder of her youngest daughter in 1989. Her works have earned her several awards including three Parents' Choice awards, the Margaret A. Edwards Award in 1992, and the 2015 Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America. She died on June 15, 2016 at the age of 82.

(Bowker Author Biography)