Dead Beautiful (A Dead Beautiful Novel)
Yvonne Woon
Language: English
Pages: 480
ISBN: 1423119614
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
On the morning of her sixteenth birthday, Renée Winters was still an ordinary girl. She spent her summers at the beach, had the perfect best friend, and had just started dating the cutest guy at school. No one she'd ever known had died. But all that changes when she finds her parents dead in the Redwood Forest, in what appears to be a strange double murder.
After the funeral Renée’s wealthy grandfather sends her to Gottfried Academy, a remote and mysterious boarding school in Maine, where she finds herself studying subjects like Philosophy, Latin, and the “Crude Sciences.”
It’s there that she meets Dante Berlin, a handsome and elusive boy to whom she feels inexplicably drawn. As they grow closer, unexplainable things begin to happen, but Renée can’t stop herself from falling in love. It’s only when she discovers a dark tragedy in Gottfried’s past that she begins to wonder if the Academy is everything it seems.
remember that once I had felt happy, felt alive, but I couldn’t actually feel it again, if that makes sense. I thought finding my sister would help fill that void. So I searched for her. For weeks. Months. Years, I guess. Since I didn’t need to eat or sleep, I’d just walk for days at a time. In the meantime, I found work. I enrolled in schools but dropped out when I realized I wasn’t interested in what anyone was teaching. Years passed, and I noticed that I wasn’t aging—at least not in a normal
there?” “Miss Winters?” he said, lightening his tone. “Of course. One moment.” I waited until the line clicked. “Renée?” My name sounded strong and definitive in my grandfather’s baritone voice. “What aren’t you telling me?” I demanded. There was a long silence. “Renée, have you ever felt pulled to someone?” Immediately Dante came to mind. “Yes.” “I’m not talking about love. I’m talking about something else. Something more magnetic.” “Yes,” I said, the word leaving my mouth before I could
pants that were worn at the knees. I was about to lean over and examine them when I heard movement around the side of the building, the soft padding of footsteps against the ground. Quickly, I ducked into the shadows and waited. But the person who emerged wasn’t the headmistress or Mrs. Lynch. It was me. I was in my coat, my brown hair dangling freely over my shoulders. I looked pretty, I thought. Unable to control my mouth, I uttered one word. “Renée.” She turned to me, her look of surprise
left side of the “garden.” Around me, dozens of gravestones peeked out of the grass, their faces so faded that I couldn’t read the inscriptions. My parents were like these people now, reduced to epitaphs, tombstones, coffins. Shaking the thought from my head, I picked up my bulb and turned it around in my palm. It was brown and bulbous like a ginger root. I held it up to my nose, but it just smelled like dry dirt. Intuition, I thought, and began to walk. I didn’t know where I was going, but I
the room, but I didn’t care. “We don’t have time for this,” my grandfather said. “The semester begins in a week. You should be grateful that Gottfried is letting you enroll this late. If it weren’t for my outstanding ties with the school, they probably wouldn’t have even considered you.” “I don’t understand,” I said, angry tears stinging my eyes. “Why would I be safer in a different school? Why don’t we just go to the police?” “The police were here; do you remember how helpful they were?