Author(s): Maureen McQuerry

Young Adult

On her eighteenth birthday, Lena decides to leave home to search for her father, who disappeared in the northern wilderness known as Scree. Scree is said to be inhabited by Peculiars--people whose unusual characteristics make them unacceptable to modern society. Many people believed Lena's father to have personality "flaws," which causes Lena to wonders if her father is the source of her own extraordinary characteristics. On the train north, Lena meets a young librarian who's traveling to a town on the edge of Scree, to work in the private library of the inventor Tobias Beasley. They cross paths with a handsome young marshal. When the marshal follows Lena to Knoster, she is unsure of his true motivations. In town, she learns more about the unusual Mr. Beasley; his mysterious home and the strange folk who go there but never come out.