Today on the blog, author Tammy Lowe shares an intriguing excerpt from her new YA action adventure, The Acadian Secret. If you're interested in young adult fantasy featuring historical settings and time travel, this is a book to add to your TBR.
Excerpt from The Acadian Secret
In the late afternoon sunshine, the man’s shoulders curled over his chest as he walked the familiar tree-lined street. The avenue bloomed in a profusion of spring blossoms. With a lump in his throat, he realized it hadn’t changed much in appearance over time.
Kind of like him.
Instead of horses and buggies, cars now drove past. Flowers overflowing from window boxes still decorated the colourful houses and shops, chimes still rang over doorways, and
people still chatted as they strolled along the main road.
When Elisabeth and her mother stepped out of the pizzeria and stopped in front of the tiny
antique shop, the man’s blue eyes clouded with tears. His brows pulled in as she pointed to an
object on display in the window before dragging her mother inside. A few minutes later they
walked back out.
The man’s chest hitched. What have I done? Dear God, what have I done?
He knew what was in the package tucked under her arm. A crystal timepiece, disguised as
a simple necklace.
He wanted to scream, but he was a shell, empty inside except for the pain. This was the
price to be paid. He must live, but live in hell, condemned to the prison of his own making
until the day he could make everything right again.
They say quartz crystal keeps the most accurate time, but Elisabeth had no idea the
amount of power hers was capable of, the science behind it, nor the millennia of earth’s magic
within it. Why don’t people believe in magic anymore? Elisabeth used to think that way, but
learned the hard way it’s all around us.
“Just look at nature,” he had said to her that summer evening in Italy when they were both
seventeen. “Does the caterpillar not turn into a majestic butterfly? Do grapes not turn into
intoxicating wine, and then into vinegar?”
The man’s eyes prickled with tears as Shakespeare’s line drifted through his mind,
reminding him instantly of something his adoptive father would have said to them. “There are
more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
The latest discovery of time crystals was a good example. Not even hypothesized until
2012, nine years later, Google’s quantum computers created the first ones, completely
contradicting Sir Isaac Newton’s first law of motion.
The man held his breath when Elisabeth looked up at him as she walked by with her
mother. Her head flinched back slightly, and he swore there was a spark of recognition in her
eyes.
Impossible.
She didn’t know him yet.
She wouldn’t for years.
He brought a shaky hand to his forehead and reminded himself to breathe again.
Giveaway
About the Author
An adventurer at heart, Tammy has explored ruins in Rome, Pompeii, and Istanbul (Constantinople) with historians and archaeologists.
She’s slept in the tower of a 15th century castle in Scotland, climbed down the cramped tunnels of Egyptian pyramids, scaled the Sydney Harbour Bridge, sailed on a tiny raft down the Yulong
River in rural China, dined at a Bedouin camp in the Arabian Desert, and escaped from head-hunters in the South Pacific.
I suppose one could say her own childhood wish of time traveling adventures came true…in a
roundabout way.
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