Hey guys! here is a little snippet of Breaking Butterflies which is out in the UK at the moment. Its an interesting original contemporary! and the cover is beautiful!
You can get the Ebook here
When my mother was a little girl, she walked to the play-
ground by herself every day after school. I can picture it
easily; photos of her as a child are almost indistinguishable
from photos of me when I was little. I used to look at her
old yellow-edged school photographs a lot. My mother had
a shy, quiet look, a round face, and the same straight brown
hair I used to have, though in every picture hers was pulled
back from her forehead in two tight little pigtails.
She was lonely when she was little. No one ever asked
her to play; she was the clumsy one whom nobody sensible
wanted on their team, the timid one who was too chicken to
climb on top of the monkey bars. It was the same for me.
While other children swirled over the jungle gym and slides
in a frenzy of make-believe and hide-and-seek, I would sit by
the swings on my own, kicking at the dust. We were two of
a kind when we were really young, I can tell. But that was
before she met Leigh, and long before I learned how to be
strong.
I don’t know much about what happened before Leigh,
about the lonely time. All that was just a vague prologue;
meeting Leigh, and what happened after that, was the real
story. That was what I’d grown up listening to my mother
tell and retell, until I’d heard it so many times that I had the
dialogue memorized and could whisper the whole thing to
myself if I wanted to. Not only was it about my mother, but
it was about me too. In a way, it was the beginning of both
of us. And I treasured that story so much that I used to let
it own me. Looking back now, two years gone by since
everything that happened when I was sixteen, I think
perhaps that was my first mistake.
My mother’s part of the story started on a Tuesday, a
week or so before her seventh birthday. She’d arrived at the
playground and found her usual swing occupied by a girl
wearing a pink tutu over her clothes. The girl had a pair of
rhinestone-studded sunglasses perched on her head, and
from her feet dangled her mother’s shoes, red and high-
heeled. She was swinging her legs back and forth
contentedly, admiring the shoes, but she looked up when
my mother drew near. Her hair was blonde and wavy, and
reached down to her waist. My mother never mentioned
being jealous of it, but I had a feeling she must’ve been.
‘What’s your name?’ the girl said.
‘Sarah,’ whispered my mother. I used to move my mouth
along with my mother as she told this part of the story,
echoing her lines.
‘Last name?’ prompted the girl.
‘Quinn,’ said my mother hesitantly.
‘Sarah Quinn,’ repeated the girl. She looked up at the sky,
and back down at her pumps. ‘That sounds like a super-
hero’s name. The name they have when they’re not doing
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