Excerpt from The Guest Book by Sarah Blake, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The boy was going to fall.

He had planted both feet, one on either side of the great head, the shaggy bronze hair covering the two ears, a foot on either shoulder, and was carefully, slowly, pushing himself up to stand, aloft.

The boy was going to break his neck.

"Edward," Nurse said, very quietly now.

The other children stopped their crawling, frozen where they were on the statue, watching the boy above them who had climbed so high. Now he was the only thing moving upon the bronze.

"Edward."

Slowly, carefully, Neddy raised himself, pushing off the poet's head, wavering just an instant, then catching steady, and stood all the way up. Steady and up so high. Compact, perfect, he stood on the statue's shoulders, a small being in short pants and a cardigan, now regarding the world of upturned, worried faces below him.

"Moss," he squawked. "Lookit."

And Moss tilted his head and saw up through the folds of the statue's jacket, the great thick hands, up past another boy clinging to the open page of that enormous book, Neddy far above, standing, grinning, and crowing.

If he'd held out his hand and said Come, fly! Moss would have flown. For when your brother calls come, you step forward, you take his hand and go. How can you not? It was always him in the front, going first.

His head tipped, his cheek still on his knee, Moss grinned up at his brother.

Neddy nodded and lightly, easily, bent again and slid from the top of the bronze lump, clambering all the way down, arriving with a little bounce as he dropped to the pebbled ground.

"Your father," Nurse promised, "will hear of this. This is going on the list."

She unlocked the brake on the pram and pushed the boy's shoulder roughly. "The list, Edward. You hear me?"

Neddy nodded. And started marching forward.

Moss stole his hand into his brother's. Both boys kept step, ahead of the pram, their little backs straight as soldiers. Smiling.

There would be no list, they knew. It was only Mother at home. Father was in Berlin.

Excerpted from The Guest Book by Sarah Blake. Copyright © 2019 by Sarah Blake. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.