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by Jennifer Donnelly
A smart, insightful, timely depiction of a young woman poised on the brink of a new world after the shattering of another."
For fans of Elizabeth George and Libba Bray, These Shallow Graves is the story of how much a young woman is willing to risk and lose in order to find the truth.
Jo Montfort is beautiful and rich, and soon - like all the girls in her class - she'll graduate from finishing school and be married off to a wealthy bachelor. Which is the last thing she wants. Jo dreams of becoming a writer - a newspaper reporter like the trailblazing Nellie Bly.
Wild aspirations aside, Jo's life seems perfect until tragedy strikes: her father is found dead. Charles Montfort shot himself while cleaning his pistol. One of New York City's wealthiest men, he owned a newspaper and was a partner in a massive shipping firm, and Jo knows he was far too smart to clean a loaded gun.
The more Jo hears about her father's death, the more something feels wrong. Suicide is the only logical explanation, and of course people have started talking, but Jo's father would never have resorted to that. And then she meets Eddie - a young, smart, infuriatingly handsome reporter at her father's newspaper—and it becomes all too clear how much she stands to lose if she keeps searching for the truth. But now it might be too late to stop.
The past never stays buried forever. Life is dirtier than Jo Montfort could ever have imagined, and this time the truth is the dirtiest part of all.
"Starred Review. Though some of the constraints placed on female behavior during that time period have faded, the injustices Donnelly highlights remain all too relevant." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Fast-paced and thrilling... a smart, insightful, timely depiction of a young woman poised on the brink of a new world after the shattering of another." - Booklist
"A beautifully written mystery." - School Library Journal
"[A] fast-paced thriller...the story races to its surprising conclusion." - Kirkus
"These Shallow Graves delivered all that I adore: lovely prose, historical intrigue, unique characters and setting. I devoured this book!" - Ruta Sepetys, New York Times bestselling author of Between Shades of Gray and Out of the Easy
"An intelligent, personable heroine...a splendidly hair-raising tour of the brightest and darkest corners of Victorian New York." - Elizabeth Wein, New York Times bestselling author of Code Name Verity and Black Dove, White Raven
"A fast-paced Gilded Age crime thriller that plunges its intrepid investigative-journalist heroine into the sordid underworld of nineteenth-century New York City and into her own family's dark secrets." - Julie Berry, award-winning author of All the Truth That's In Me
"Jo Montfort is a gutsy modern heroine in a beguiling tale of old New York. Money, murder, betrayal, and family secrets...I loved spending time in this world!" - Elizabeth Ross, author of William C. Morris Award finalist Belle Epoque
This information about These Shallow Graves was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jennifer Donnelly is the author of three adult novels, The Tea Rose, The Winter Rose, and The Wild Rose, as well as the young adult novels These Shallow Graves, Revolution, and A Northern Light, winner of Britain's prestigious Carnegie Medal, the L.A. Times Book Prize for Young Adult Literature, and a Michael L. Printz Honor Book Award. She lives and writes full-time in upstate New York. You can visit her at jenniferdonnelly.com.
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