I Am Margaret Moore: A Novel

by Hannah Capin

Genres: YA Fantasy; YA Mysteries & Thrillers; YA Horror; Horror

Synopsis

Lyrical and haunting, Hannah Capin's I Am Margaret Moore is a paranormal thriller that tests the hold of sisterhood and truth.

I am a girl. I am a monster, too.

Each summer the girls of Deck Five come back to Marshall Naval School. They sail on jewel-blue waters; they march on green drill-fields; they earn sunburns and honors. They push until they break apart and heal again, stronger.

Each summer Margaret and Rose and Flor and Nisreen come back to the place where they are girls, safe away from the world: sisters bound by something more than blood.

But this summer everything has changed. Girls are missing and a boy is dead. It’s because of Margaret Moore, the boys say. It’s because of what happened that night in the storm.

Margaret’s friends vanish one by one, swallowed up into the lies she has told about what happened between her and a boy with the world at his feet. Can she unravel the secrets of this summer and last, or will she be pulled under by the place she once called home?
"Lyrical writing distinguishes this haunting summer camp thriller as an enthralling literary mystery with crossover appeal...[an] ingenious story about misogyny and power dynamics." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

 

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Release date: March 15, 2022

Publisher: Wednesday Books

Print pages: 313

Sample

THE SUMMER

IT IS SUMMER AGAIN and we are alive.

All year we are ordinary girls. We trudge through snowbanks under gray skies. We study trigonometry late into the night. We ride horses and play piano; we put on new dresses for the homecoming dance; we give good-night kisses on bright doorsteps while our mothers peek through the curtains.

We exist, all apart from each other, in our own small corners of the world.

But today it is summer again and we are a thousand times more than that.

Today we are back at Marshall Summer Naval School. All the black-and-white winter is gone and the whole world is bold and gleaming.

It is our very last summer. In six weeks, in August, we will fold our uniforms and pack them into suitcases. We will press our palms to the gold M at the top of the stairs one last time: for luck and for tradition. We will leave forever, like all the girls before us.

But today it is summer again and it is ours.

And we are alive.



THE GIRLS



FLOR IS THE FIRST of us to arrive.

I see her from where I sit, cradled in a sycamore branch that bends out over the lake. I am wrapped in green shade but she stalks through sunlight, a leather suitcase in each hand. Her walk belongs to a girl who owns the world: shoulders thrown back, but the shadow of a slouch to her hips. She has come in a dark Cadillac with two men who might be uncles or guards or both. If her father had his way, they would follow her all summer. But here, for once, she is not the general’s daughter.

Here we are only Marshall girls. We live behind glass and gray wood on green lawns. The forest hems us to the shore of Lake Nanweshmot; the forest keeps us safe away from the world. Here they push us until we break and heal and break again. We are everything and everything is ours.

Nisreen is next. She comes in with a swarm of girls and boys on the airport bus. She holds her sister’s hand, her sister who is here for her very first summer, nine years old and a Butterfly. Nisreen crouches down and sunbeams strike through the gaps in the trees. She speaks soft and patient until her sister nods and holds herself straighter. At last she takes the path to the deck, alone.

A girl runs out fast enough for her heels to hit the hem of her kilt. She does not slow down. They crash together, meteoric, and something deep within the earth shifts back to where it always should have been.

Flor, swept up in the moment. Nisreen, swept up in Flor’s arms.

They spin and spin there in the hot of the sun. Then they are walking, their steps matched and easy, with Flor carrying the heaviest of Nisreen’s bags.

Rose is last. Her mother’s car lets her out on the sidewalk, and Rose already has her Victory Race notebook under her arm and a cap pulled down tight over her curls. She is ready for summer and for winning. Before she makes her way into the deck she stops and gazes out along the shore; at the sycamore with its low branch.

I want with all my heart to jump down and run for her the way Flor ran for Nisreen. The way I ran, last summer, for a boy from Naval One.

This summer I will not run for him.

Rose disappears behind the gray wood building. I know every step she takes: up to the office to get her keys and turn in all the real-world things we aren’t allowed here; then to the end of the hall, the last room on the north side. Flor has already made one bed with perfect square corners. She will be across the hall, in the room I share with Nisreen. Rose will make up her bed and hang her uniforms and tack pictures to the crumbling corkboard: one of every Winston at Marshall, and one of our first Butterfly cabin.

One from last June, before we turned tan and sunbleached. Flor and Nisreen, Rose and me, fingertips clutching into each other’s arms. Laughing and right.

When they are unpacked they will come out to me, and we will be together again, and it will be our summer: this is what I hope with all my life.

I sit in the crook of our sycamore and I wait for them.

I need them back. We need us back.

Everything depends on it.