
Jacqueline Horsfall

Always play lightly on the earth . . .

Jackie Horsfall definitely understands why celebrities get peeved with stalking paparazzi because deer follow her everywhere—tagging along on hikes, grouping in her driveway, chowing her apple trees, even (creepy!) staring at her through her office window. That’s when the thought hit: They must want me to write about them. Jackie’s long writing career started right out of college, when she was hired into the White House Correspondence Section—answering the President’s mail. Since then she’s published hundreds of stories, articles, and poems in leading children’s magazines like Highlights, Ranger Rick, Jack and Jill, Humpty Dumpty’s, Current Health, Pockets, Cobblestone, Calliope. She’s the author of a dozen joke-and-riddle books, as well as the award-winning nature book Play Lightly on the Earth, translated into German and Japanese. On the serious side, Jackie worked for years as the director of a women’s center and a county crisis referral center. The female characters in her stories mirror the trials of real women in real situations. After living in Germany and traveling widely in Europe and Russia, Jackie now makes her home (amid snooping deer) in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. She loves getting fan e-mails and is a pro at responding—just ask the President :)


For the Love of Strangers Jacqueline Horsfall ISBN-13--978-1-61603-003-2 ISBN-10--1-61603-003-8 Release Date: Fall 2010		Philoxenia. When the police call using this code word, 16-year-old Darya knows she will be sheltering strangers: women with missing teeth, dislocated jaws, black eyes—and stalking husbands. Other strangers—nonhuman—seek Darya’s protection too, whispering from the depths of the forest in voices only she can hear. If she obeys the voices, she risks her adoptive mother’s rage, the taunts of a surly island boy, and the wrath of her community. If she refuses the voices, a primeval species faces extermination. What if you discovered your birth fulfilled an ancient prophecy? What if you were destined to save an entire wild species? Would you heed the call?
Excerpt:

And then I hear it. Or half-hear it. A voice. A wordless call carried in a gust of wind from deep in the woods. I sense it more than hear it, not my name, but a moaning that pierces my chest, squeezes the soul-nugget within. I strain to hear it again, to prove to myself that it’s not just my imagination. It comes again, this time as a sense of water trickling in a shallow creek that never seems to freeze. I’m shivering but sweating at the same time, like a person possessed. A branch snaps nearby. Dry leaves crunch under the stand of pines, where the snow hasn’t reached the ground. Not the light rustle of a squirrel or woodchuck but a heavier thumping sound, of paws or hoofs or boots. I tense, listening for the grunting huff of a bear, the snarl of a bobcat. But the wind picks up, and a low whooshing sweeps through the pinetops.