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No one remembered the books but her. That was the first sentence in The Book of Briars.
Ilya bristled when she first read that line because she knew the “her” mentioned in the passage was not her and felt the line had been a nasty, underhanded swipe from the writer at Ilya’s own failing memory. It was cruel. But waiting for new pages, waiting to know what would happen next, had been even crueler. The writer had not written in nearly two months—a still, late, sweltering summer without a single click of a typewriter key from the fourth floor. And Ilya desperately needed to know what happened next. But the room in the tower of the old, dark house was quiet. The typewriter keys remained untapped. So Ilya wandered the dark and waited for more of the book—a book through which the writer had
