Beautiful Oddities

Be careful what you wish for. For nearly two centuries, the women of Clara Wishbone's family have carried the same inheritance: a wish. A wish for wealth. A wish for love. A wish for the sea. A wish for a child. Each wish was granted. Each woman paid for it with everything she had. When Clara turns fifteen in the quiet coastal town of Morro Bay, she believes her life will always remain the same-sketching beside the harbor, watching the pelican that has never once left the dock, and listening to the steady silence of the grandfather who raised her. But strange things begin to surface: a seal watching her from the harbor, a moth pressing against her window in the night, and a journal her family has kept hidden for nearly two hundred years, written by women she has never met. Inside the pages lies a truth her family has guarded for generations: the women in Clara's bloodline do not simply die. They change. Bound to the wishes that shaped their lives, they remain behind in the forms of animals -watching their daughters from the edges of the world, unable to leave until someone finally breaks the curse that began long ago with a single act of betrayal. And somewhere in Morro Bay, a shopkeeper has been keeping her own family's part of that secret for just as long. Now the weight of that legacy has reached Clara. For the first time in nearly two hundred years, one daughter must choose not to wish. Because the only way to free the women who came before her... is to let go of everything she loves.