Excerpt: Liesl & Po by Lauren Oliver

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I'm hoping to be able to get to this one during Helluva Halloween, but just in case I don't, here's a little teaser of Liesl & Po, "a tale of one girl, two ghosts, and the most powerful magic in the world"...

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On the third night after the day her father died, Liesl saw the ghost.

She was lying in bed in the uniform gray darkness of her small attic room when in one corner the shadows seemed to crimp, or flex, and suddenly standing next to her wobbly desk and three-legged chair was a person about her height.  It was as though the darkness was a sheet of raw cookie dough and someone had just taken a cookie cutter and made a child-sized shape out of it.

Liesl sat up, alarmed.

"What are you?" she whispered into the darkness, even though she knew it was a ghost.  Normal people do not appear out of darkness, nor seem to be made of liquid shadow.  Besides, she had read about ghosts. She read a lot in her little attic room.  There was not much else to do.

"Po," the ghost said. "My name is Po."

"Where did you come from?" Liesl asked.

"From the Other Side," the ghost said, as though it were obvious, as though her were saying "from downstairs," or "from Oak Street," or some other place she knew.

"Are you a boy or a girl?"  Liesl was wearing the same thin nightshirt she had been wearing since Tuesday, when her father died, and it occurred to her that if the ghost was a boy, she should cover up.

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Liesl & Po hit stores today!