Swallowing Stones

by Joyce McDonald

Genres: YA Coming of Age

Synopsis

For anyone who has wanted to change the past, this captivating and haunting novel is about seemingly innocent choices and their devastating consequences. 
 
When Michael fires his new rifle into the air on his seventeenth birthday, he never imagines that the bullet will end up killing someone. But it does—and Michael’s world is changed forever. Desperate, he wrestles with his guilt and keeps silent as his life begins to fall apart.
 
When Jenna’s father is killed in a freak Fourth of July accident, she’s devastated. As she grieves, she tries to understand why she no longer feels comfortable with her boyfriend, Jason, and why a guy named Michael keeps appearing in her dreams. . . .


"[An] electrifying portrayal of fear and deception." –Publishers Weekly 

Release date: May 22, 2012

Publisher: Laurel Leaf

Print pages: 272

Sample

It was all true, then. The nightmare was real. Michael could no longer pretend, as he sometimes did, that there was a chance he hadn't fired that fatal shot. The bullet had come from somewhere in his neighborhood. The chances of someone else in such a small area shooting off a gun around noon on that same day were probably one in a million. He had spent weeks trying to get used to the idea that he had committed this hideous act. But always, somewhere, there had been hope. A bullet traveling a mile or more through the air could have come from as far away as the next town over. There had always been the outside chance that someone else had fired a gun into the air that Fourth of July afternoon. Now that chance no longer existed.