Your eyes are closed, and whoever it is hasn’t made a sound.īut the silence is thicker than usual it weighs more, in the way that a withholding friend is worse than one who’s just neglecting you. There’s a certain kind of silence when you wake in the deep of night, in a strange bed, knowing that someone has entered the room. The wily Cristofana wants nothing less of May than to inhabit each other’s lives, but with the Black Death ravaging Old Florence, can May’s longing for Marco’s touch be anything but madness? Lush with atmosphere both passionate and eerie, this evocative tale follows a girl on the brink of womanhood as she dares to transcend the familiar - and discovers her sensual power. And when later she follows the menacing Cristofana through a portal to fourteenth-century Florence, May never expects to find safety in the eyes of Marco, a soulful painter who awakens in her a burning desire and makes her feel truly seen. But when May wakes one night sensing someone in her room, only to find her ghostly twin staring back at her, normalcy becomes a distant memory. A chance to forget that back in Vermont, May’s parents, and all semblance of safety, were breaking up.

It was meant to be a diversion - a summer in Florence with her best friend, Liam, and his travel-writer mom, doing historical research between breaks for gelato. In a sensual paranormal romance, a teen girl’s doppelgänger from 1348 Florence lures her into the past in hopes of exacting a deadly trade.

Plague in the Mirror by Deborah Noyes