Safe Places: Guest Post By Laura Bickle

We are incredibly pleased to welcome Laura Bickle back to the Salon today. Be sure to check out her new YA novel, The Hallowed Ones, as well as the rest of her fabulous titles.

Safe Places
By Laura Bickle

We all need safe places.

When we’re growing up, we crave places of security. Places that are havens where we can test ourselves without fear of the consequences of failure. Places where we can plan our futures under the wings of people who love us. Katie, the heroine of THE HALLOWED ONES, lives in a place like that. She’s grown up in a peaceful Amish settlement. She lives with her parents and sister in the house where she was born. Church services take place in members’ backyards. She knows every other person in the settlement. Crime is unheard-of. Though she has many responsibilities, Katie has always been free to wander about the rural settlement.

And she is free to daydream. Katie is looking forward to her Rumspringa, a time when Amish youth may test their boundaries and taste the English world before choosing to be baptized in the Amish church. She intends to explore the outside world with her childhood friend, Elijah. She knows that this is the man she will marry, but she wants to see the world beyond the fence before returning to the nest of her community as an adult Amish woman.

But Katie’s plans are shattered when a helicopter crashes into the field near her home. The pilot is killed, and Katie sees red eyes in the burning wreckage. Something not human. For the first time, she feels that her community is no longer the sanctuary it was.

Something is devastating the outside world. Something violent, something that has inspired even the ravens in her fields to flee in terror. Unsure why they haven’t yet been attacked, the Amish Elders make a decree: no one goes outside their community, and no one is allowed in. But when Katie finds a gravely injured young man lying just outside the boundary of their land, she can’t leave him to die. She refuses to submit to the Elders’ rule and secretly brings the stranger into her community—but what else is she bringing in with him?

Katie must decide when safety must be sacrificed in order to serve the higher virtue of compassion. She will learn how to create her own shelter, as an adult woman. The safe place she knew in her childhood is gone, and she must struggle to protect those she loves from the gathering darkness.

THE HALLOWED ONES
Laura Bickle
Reading level: Ages 12 and up
Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Graphia
(September 25, 2012)
ISBN-10: 0547859260
ISBN-13: 978-0547859262

If your home was the last safe place on earth, would you let a stranger in?

In this captivating thriller, an Amish settlement is the last safe haven in a world plagued by an unspeakable horror…

Katie is on the verge of her Rumspringa, the time in Amish life when teenag-ers are free to experience non-Amish culture before officially joining the church. But before Rumspringa arrives, Katie’s safe world starts to crumble. It begins with a fiery helicopter crash in the cornfields, followed by rumors of massive unrest and the disappearance of huge numbers of people all over the world. Something is out there...and it is making a killing.

Unsure why they haven’t yet been attacked, the Amish Elders make a de-cree: No one goes outside their community, and no one is allowed in. But when Katie finds a gravely injured young man lying just outside the boundary of their land, she can’t leave him to die. She refuses to submit to the Elder’s rule and secretly brings the stranger into her community—but what else is she bringing in with him?

About the Author

Laura Bickle's professional background is in criminal justice and library science. When she's not patrolling the stacks at the public library, she can be found reaming up stories about the monsters under the stairs.


She has written several contemporary fantasy novels for adults, and THE HALLOWED ONES is her first young adult novel. Laura lives in Ohio with her husband and five mostly-reformed feral cats. For more about Laura, please visit her website at: www.laurabickle.com.