An immersive, vignette-style novel about the sudden reappearance of a missing girl and the effect it has on her twin sister and their broken family

THE SECOND LIFE OF AVA RIVERS
by Faith Gardner
Razorbill, August 2018

Ava’s disappearance was the crack in the Rivers family glacier. I wish I could explain to you how we were before, but I can’t, because the before is so filmy and shadowed with the after. The after is all Vera remembers. When her twin sister Ava disappeared, her childhood became a blur of theories, tips, and leads, but never any answers. The case made headlines, shocked their Northern California community, and turned the Rivers into tragic celebrities. Now, at eighteen, Vera is counting down the days until she starts her new life at college in Portland, Oregon, far away from the dark cloud she and family have lived under for eleven years. But all that changes when a blonde, blue-eyed girl shows up at the local hospital.
She says her name is Ava Rivers and she wants to go home.
Told through sparse, poetic, non-linear vignettes, THE SECOND LIFE OF AVA RIVERS is a haunting and beautiful story about a broken family brought back together.

Faith Gardner‘s short fiction has been featured in literary journals, online magazines and anthologies. Her first young adult novel, PERDITA, has been published by Merit Press in 2015.