I am thrilled to be hosting a spot on the AFTER THE FALL by Ellen Parent Blog Tour hosted by Rockstar Book Tours. Check out my post and make sure to enter the giveaway!
About The Book:
Author: Ellen Parent
Pub. Date: December 3, 2024
Publisher: Fitzroy Books
Formats: Paperback, eBook, Audiobook
Pages: 266
Find it: Goodreads, https://books2read.com/AFTER-THE-FALL-Parent
“A gripping, visceral, post-apocalyptic story brimming with adventure and heart.” – Kirkus Reviews
So much is forgotten in the Republic: the way the seasons used to turn like pages in a book, the technology that once made life easy for everyone, even the art of reading. For fifteen-year-old June, the forgetting goes even deeper, ever since a mysterious accident six years ago stole her mother and her memory. When a strange circus with ties to her family comes through town, she follows them without a second thought. In the outside world, June has to navigate a landscape and society pushed to the edge by the powerful forces of climate change, and to decide who she can trust in a world where everyone seems to have secrets. Can she believe the grizzled deputy who somehow knows more about her past than she does? What about the circus performers, who push her away even as they beguile her best friend? Only when she finally uncovers a truth that threatens to change the Republic forever, will she know who her true family is— and whose life is worth saving.
Excerpt
1
Two things made me finally leave the Hollow, even though I should’ve left a hundred times before. One was seeing Jacob again, and the other was the circus. I’d heard about the circus from Old Bill, of all people, who spent most of his days riding a broken-down old bicycle from place to place, begging work and being a nuisance. I came across him when I was walking back up the hill on the day of the storm. The squeak of his bike sounded through the woods from a ways off, so I had time to think about hiding somewhere till he passed. He wouldn’t hurt me, he wasn’t that kind of criminal, but he would try to talk to me, and that was almost worse. “Hey, June!” I heard before I could find a spot to hide. I kept walking, waiting for him to catch up. We were in the poison parsnip field and the tall dry rods of dead parsnip rose up on either side of the path like the bars on a prison. I’d been digging parsnip root out of the muddy dirt for dinner, trying hard not to touch the stinging stems. Past the field, the mountains were gray walls with a little stubble of green at their feet. The sky overhead was gray, too, and the parsnip swayed like there might be some weather on the way. I glanced up and saw low-bellied clouds to the north. Ever since the double winter, it seemed storms were coming more and more often. Like the end of the world wasn’t hard enough already.
The squeaking got closer and closer, and I ignored my body itching to run. No reason to run when you’re not being chased. Still, I wondered how Old Bill had lived this long, what with his way of showing up when he wasn’t wanted. Finally he slowed down beside me, his wispy gray rattail blowing in the breeze. His bike was rusty red and he kept the tires patched with pine pitch and his own sticky spit, probably.
“Didn’t you hear me calling?” he gasped, stepping off the bike and then rustling along to catch back up with me. “Hello, Bill,” I said. My teeth were tingling like they wanted to bite. I pulled up my collar, just to make sure all my scars were out of sight. He knew about them—everyone knew—but that didn’t mean I liked the staring. I wished I’d worn my mom’s old jacket, but I’d left it behind on account of the day’s warmth. Bill was wearing layers of patched sweaters with an oily sheepskin vest on top. It wasn’t much different from what I wore, but my clothes didn’t stink like his. I wondered if he avoided washing just for effect. Rounded out his scummy im age nicely, I thought. He was the kind of tinker who’d clean off your solar panels or patch your roof on a good day, but who’d just as soon steal the tools from your shed if you didn’t give him work.
“Your parents up there?” he asked, eyeing me a little hungrily. He’d started looking at me differently lately, in a way that made my hair stand up. Cyrus, whose family lived up above the stream and who thought he was going to be my husband in a few years, would’ve whacked Old Bill on the head for what his eyes were doing. Cyrus didn’t know that I’d take his sister over him any day, and neither did Old Bill.
“Your parents need anything?” Old Bill insisted when I didn’t answer.
They aren’t my parents and you know it. That’s what I wanted to say. But I wasn’t in the habit of saying what I thought. I had secrets, things no one knew about. I didn’t ever say, I’m not gonna get married and stuck here forever, and I didn’t ever say, My mom is coming back for me, and then we’re gonna go somewhere you folks in the Hollow probably can’t even imagine. It was simpler not saying, sometimes.
“You can ask them yourself,” is what I told Old Bill. “I never seen you smile,” he said next. Just the kind of dumb thing he’d started saying recently.
“Well, I don’t drink like you do. What do you want me to smile about?”
He laughed at that. “Just ’cause the world’s over don’t mean you can’t smile!” he said. A rod of poison parsnip got stuck in the spokes of his bike, and he stopped to get it out. I kept walking. When he caught up, we were almost to the house. I could see it through the broken woods—all the trees in this spot were dead, or almost dead, since the drought and the double winter a few years back. But new stuff was growing up in the woods—lots of kudzu, and some hardwood saplings too. So the Hollow wasn’t done living yet.
“You’d smile more if you saw the circus,” Old Bill said off handedly, just loud enough for me to hear.
“What circus?”
“Oh, you’re probably not that interested, too busy moping around to—”
“What circus?” I said again, louder and harder. I don’t think this was the effect he’d intended, but it made him answer. “A new one. Jeff Quigley said he seen them in Dorset, and they’s on a tour all the way up to Middlebury for Town Meeting. Jeff promised they was stopping in the Borough. They got a fire-eater and everything. I could take you, if you like.” It was always big news when something different happened in the Republic. Oftentimes it was something bad: a new strain of flu, a flood, another attack from the Yorkers. But every once in a while, like this time, it was something good. There were a couple of circuses that made the rounds in the Republic. Even hungry folks got starved for a laugh, and they’d pay what they could to see a show.
The thing was, circuses almost always had more than just tricks and juggling to offer. Sometimes they traveled with a tinker—they deal with electricity and machines, and some people think they’re in league with the devil. Sometimes it was a peddler, and that’d be good news for me because peddlers always had books to sell. But the really important thing that traveling circuses had was news. Information from far away. They could tell you who they’d met, and where. And that was more important than books.
“Still got your little simpleton?” Old Bill said, looking up at the house.
Thomas was there by the edge of the porch, corncob pipe clenched in his mouth. He’d only just lost his last baby teeth. That’s funny, coming from you, I wanted to say to Old Bill, but I didn’t say anything because sometimes keeping quiet made him go away. Thomas watched us from the edge of the house, and even though he didn’t move an inch, I could tell he was happy to see me from the tilt of his head and the way his hand was half raised, almost a wave. He must’ve heard us coming and run around from the greenhouse where Bob had him picking slugs. I grinned up at him and he smiled back.
“I can’t see why ol’ Bob and Denise keep taking in help that don’t do no helping,” Bill was saying. He’d taken a white plastic pill bottle out of his fanny pack and was trying to pry the lid off. “The Warrens—now they only bring on orphans that can lift fifty pounds. And they don’t have no roof falling in or slug rot. What’s the point of an orphan that don’t work?”
What’s the point of a dirty tramp that steals your hammer when he says he’s going to patch the roof? I waved up at Thomas, but Bill was still struggling with the pill bottle. I wondered if his finger joints hurt him.
“You need help?” I asked halfheartedly.
“Think you’re stronger ’n me, orphan?” Bill cackled. “Damn thing’s stuck.”
“Here,” I said. I pulled it out of his hand and read the top of the lid. “It says push down and turn.” I pushed the lid down and screwed it off. The motion made something uncomfortable flicker inside me, and I handed the bottle back quick. Memories sometimes happened to me like that, like shadows from an unexpected cloud.
“Unnatural, reading,” Bill muttered, taking the pill bottle. “Thanks kindly.” He shook a blue tab onto his palm. “LoTab dreams tonight… You want in?”
I stepped away quick, wrapping my hands around my bag of parsnip roots. “I gotta go.” My voice was wary, but as I turned away I’d already forgotten Old Bill and his LoTabs—I was going to the circus, and maybe they’d have the news I was looking for.
The sky churned with wind and clouds above me as I walked up the yard—I’d been right about the weather coming. The darkening before a storm always made the world look different, like maybe you’d gotten lost and ended up somewhere you didn’t belong. Or like you were in a dream you wanted to wake up from. The windows of the house were dark—Denise hadn’t lit any lamps yet—and its jumble of plastic siding and tacked on sheet metal seemed as strange as it had the first night I laid eyes on it. The clearing was still littered with Bob’s projects too: a yellow car with the engine pulled out, a big brush pile, a half-built shed for the chickens. Thomas was the only change.
I started up the steps, and Old Bill turned his bike around. “Storm’s coming, June. Guess I’ll see you at the circus!” I didn’t answer. I climbed over the broken step and onto the porch. I wanted to run, but instead I just made a face at Thomas, who flicked his middle finger at Old Bill’s back.
The rain came hard just after dinner—it was our second bad storm in just a couple of weeks, and when the wind picked up, we started to hear the crash of trees falling in the pine stand. Their roots couldn’t hold up to it all, not with the dirt already soft from the last rain.
Bob and Denise liked to spend the start of storms in the living room, and it wouldn’t do to say no to them. They’d taken me in as a farmhand after I got burned in the fire and lost my mom. I figured I owed a lot to them, and I also figured they’d kick me out to starve or freeze to death in the storms if I got cheeky and stopped doing what they said. But Thomas didn’t seem to care about that stuff. Right after dinner he disappeared up the stairs.
Denise clicked her tongue, watching him go. Her legs had gone swollen and red in the past months, and she didn’t walk much anymore.
“That boy’s gone antisocial, more than usual,” Denise said. Not to me, I thought. She didn’t understand him like I did. “He’s just scared of the storm,” I said, flipping idly through
the pages of The Spy Craft Manual; I was waiting for my time to bring up the circus, so I only pretended to read.
“Storm ain’t in here yet,” Denise said, but nothing more. Storms scared all of us, no matter how often they came. For a little while we sat quiet, listening hard for trees falling or worse. There’d been a landslide over across the valley last month. I’d seen it from up in the Warrens’ high field, a big tear cut down the mountain.
“Old Bill says there’s a circus coming this way,” I said finally, trying to sound casual.
“Yep, Joe Staples reckons he saw ’em coming down from Dorset Pass. Might be in the Borough by now, if they ain’t caught in the rain,” Bob said, frowning down at the boot he was resoling with a tire tread from his collection. He was wearing overalls faded soft as lamb’s fleece. His hat had Dorr Oil printed on it, or at least that’s what it had read before the letters started peeling off. I told him what it said once, but he’d looked at me like I was speaking French and said, “It’s a hat, it can’t say nothing.”
Now my heart skipped and I closed my lips tight to keep from saying anything. Bob didn’t like things happening too fast. I wanted to jump up and out into the rain and run down the Brook Road all the way to the Borough. But I sat and laced my fingers together.
“Cyrus came by when you were out and dropped off a full tin can,” Denise said to me. “One of the old ones and no sign of mold. I need you to read it before I open it—it’s got no pictures, and I want to know straight away whether it’s cat food or peaches.”
“I want to go to the circus,” I blurted out.
“Did you hear what I said about Cyrus?” Denise said. At the same time, Bob said, “You’re sure as heck not going out in this weather.”
“I can go soon as the rain stops, though?” I said. “Might need to make repairs on the greenhouse after this wind, and I can’t do that alone,” Bob said slowly, sticking his bone awl through the tire tread.
“Don’t you care that your match came by here and left a present, girl?” Denise cut in.
“The circus might be gone if I wait.” I swallowed. Had to lay on some sugar too, I realized. “And that’s nice Cyrus came by. I’m sorry I missed him.” That was about as much sugar as I had in me.
“Why you want to see a circus anyway?” Bob asked. “I—I want to see if they have books to trade,” I said. Better not to complicate the matter with the real reason I wanted to go.
“Joe said he seen an American flag in one of their boxes when he helped ’em cross the river down in Dorset.” Bob made like he wanted to spit, but stopped since we were indoors. “You don’t want to bother with that kind of folk.”
“American?” I asked. My heart fluttered at that. If they were American, I wanted to go even more.
“Oh, don’t get him going,” Denise said. She sounded snippy but a little worried too. “That circus ain’t American. Yorkers wouldn’t be able to get a whole circus across the border without the Green Mountain Boys noticing! Now go get that can from the cupboard and read it, girl.”
I went to the kitchen. The window over the sink was covered and the cracks were stuffed, but I could still hear a drip of water pushing through. In the other room, Denise clucked at Bob, who was muttering something else about the Yorkers. No one their age talked about America without getting angry. They were bitter and afraid for the Republic, because their grand parentsused to get raided by Americans back in the time just after the Fall. But a lot of young folks were more curious than scared of whatever was across the border, since we’d never seen anything to make a fuss about.
I brought the can back into the main room.
“If it’s not the Yorkers trying to steal our good soil, it’s the New Mainers poaching our live trees for fuel. They’re scoundrels, every last American, and I’d know,” Bob was growling, punching the awl through his shoe like it was an American too.
“We know, Bob; they’re trouble,” Denise said, in that voice she used when she knew he wasn’t listening to her. “Stay away from the border, the both of you,” Bob said. I didn’t answer, and neither did Denise. Bob wasn’t talking to us, exactly. He spoke slow and ponderous, but once he got going it was hard stopping him.
“I been on the other side. I been to Old York. Crossed for a grain trade with my dad way back. And I seen horrible things, things I won’t ever forget. People strung up like animals, kept in cages. It’s their system, see—you break a few rules or you do something to offend one of the governors, that’s it. There’s no life for you except for work and dying—”
“June, you got that can?” Denise interrupted. She was the only one who could wrangle Bob when he got going with one of his stories.
“I tell you, without the Green Mountain Boys, the Republic would be overrun.” Bob didn’t want to stop. “They’re the bravest of us, keeping our borders safe. Noble, they are. Thomas works hard and gets strong and maybe one day he can become a Green hisself. Bring pride to us.”
“June?” Denise said again.
I waited, but Bob waved a hand to say he was done. I was glad. I got an uneasy feeling in my stomach whenever Bob talked about wanting Thomas to be a Green Mountain Boy. My mom hadn’t trusted the law, and neither did I. I could re
member that much.
“The can says mixed vegetables,” I announced.
“Well, isn’t that nice,” Denise said loudly, letting Bob know that the talk about America was over. “After the storm’s passed, June, you go up to the Warrens’ and give our thanks. Enough about this circus for tonight.”
I’m not going up to the Warrens’. I didn’t say that.
“There’s rain coming in the kitchen,” I said instead. I put the vegetables in Denise’s hands and left before they could say anything else about Cyrus or tin cans or why going to the circus was a bad idea. I’d heard enough.
About Ellen Parent:
Ellen Parent has been telling stories since the mid-nineties, when she started whispering them down to her sister on the bottom bunk. Her poetry has been published in Bloodroot, Vermont Magazine, Birchsong, and was shortlisted for the 2014 Vermont Writers Prize. After the Fall is her first novel. She lives in rural Vermont with her delightful husband, her precocious daughter, and two eccentric cats.
Website | Instagram | Goodreads | Amazon
Giveaway Details:
1 winner will receive a $25 Amazon Gift Card, International.
Ends December 17th, midnight EST.
http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/e2389ba21890/?
Tour Schedule:
Week One:
| 12/2/2024 | Ogitchida Kwe’s Book Blog | Excerpt |
| 12/2/2024 | Book Review Virginia Lee Blog | Excerpt/IG Post |
| 12/3/2024 | Two Chicks on Books | Excerpt/IG Post |
| 12/3/2024 | Daily Waffle | Excerpt |
| 12/4/2024 | @callistoscalling | IG Post |
| 12/4/2024 | @mjreadsmagic | IG Post |
| 12/5/2024 | Fire and Ice Reads | Excerpt/IG Post |
| 12/5/2024 | TX Girl Reads | Excerpt/IG Post |
| 12/6/2024 | Edith’s Little Free Library | IG Post/LFL Drop Pic/TikTok Post |
| 12/6/2024 | @fiction._.fuss | Review/IG Post |
Week Two:
| 12/9/2024 | @enthuse_reader | IG Review/TikTok Post |
| 12/9/2024 | @evergirl200 | IG Review/TikTok Post |
| 12/10/2024 | Haney Hayes PR | Review/IG Post |
| 12/10/2024 | Kim’s Book Reviews and Writing Aha’s | Review/IG Post |
| 12/11/2024 | Lifestyle of Me | Review |
| 12/11/2024 | rolo_the_book_lover- | IG Review/TikTok Post |
| 12/12/2024 | Review Thick And Thin | Review/IG Post |
| 12/12/2024 | A Blue Box Full of Books | IG Review/LFL Drop Pic/TikTok Post |
| 12/13/2024 | Deal sharing aunt | Review |
| 12/13/2024 | Country Mamas With Kids | Review/IG Post |