Celeste (Gemini) (Mass Market Paperback)

~ (Author) "I can't exactly remember the first time we saw our mother stop whatever she was doing, look out at the darkness, smile, nod, and softly..." (more)
Key Phrases: turret room, chintz sofa, Detective Young, Officer Harold, Infant Jordan (more...)

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Product Description

He was her mirror image. Now the mirror has cracked.

Celeste and her identical twin brother, Noble, are as close as can be -- until a tragic accident takes Noble's life. It's a loss that pushes their mother, a woman obsessed with New Age superstitions, over the edge....

Desperate to keep her son "alive," Celeste's mother forces her to cut her hair, wear boys' clothes, and take on Noble's identity. Celeste has virtually disappeared -- until a handsome boy moves in next door, and Celeste will risk her mother's wrath to let herself come back to life.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue: The Voices Mommy Heard

I can't exactly remember the first time we saw our mother stop whatever she was doing, look out at the darkness, smile, nod, and softly say something like, "I understand. Yes. Thank you," to no one we could see, but every time she did it, I felt an eerie excitement, a pleasant chill like the quiver I might feel sliding down a hill on my sled or leaping off the rock to splash in our pond. When I was very little, seeing and hearing Mommy speak to her spirits was simply scary fun, and no matter what I was doing at the time, I would stop and listen and watch her, and then Noble would stop playing and listen, too. Sometimes we would hear Daddy talk to himself and Mommy as well, but this was different, and only Mommy did it.

I would look at Noble to see if he made any sense of it, and he would look at me with a confused expression, the dimple we both shared in our left cheeks flashing prominently, his eyebrows, like mine, raised and twisted. Neither of us understood, but neither of us asked her about it.

I knew in my heart that in time, she would tell us.

And yes, one day she pulled us aside and hugged us to her, kissing both our foreheads and cheeks, perhaps kissing Noble a little more because she always seemed to think he needed more of her kisses than I did, and then she told us everything with great excitement in her voice, as much excitement as someone learning what she was going to get for Christmas.

"I am going to let you both know a great secret," she said. "It's time for me to tell you. Do you know what a secret is, Noble?" she asked.

She didn't ask me because she knew I knew. I was a far better reader and listener than Noble was, and I had twice the vocabulary. He nodded, but not with any real confidence in his eyes, so she explained.

"It's something you must not tell anyone else, something you must keep locked up here and here," she said, pointing to his head and his heart. "It's a very bad thing to tell a secret after you have promised not to do that. Understand?"

Noble nodded firmly now and Mommy relaxed, took a deep breath, and continued.

She told us she heard voices no one else could hear, not even Daddy, and she could see people -- spirits, she called them -- that he couldn't see.

"Who are they?" I asked.

She said they were the spirits and the voices of all her dead ancestors, and then she drew up a ghostly mélange of men and women with distinct and interesting personalities, girls who still whined about their lost lovers, men who were stern but wise, women who were beautiful and women who were plain, even disabled, like Auntie Helen Roe, who had polio when she was very young and was in a wheelchair until the day she died. She told us they buried her wheelchair with her and she was still in it, even in the spiritual world. She made it sound as if they were actually in the room with us, sitting there, smiling and watching her tell all about them. I kept looking around, expecting to see someone.

Whether they were all true ancestors or merely inventions of Mommy's imagination didn't matter at the moment. I wanted them to be as real as the occasional visitors who came to our ancestral home, a large three-story Queen Anne house first built by my mother's great-grandfather William De Forest Jordan, who had laid claim to acres and acres of rich riverbed land in an upstate New York valley nestled almost in camera by Mother Nature.

His portrait hung in the living room over the fireplace. He was stocky, with a thick neck and heavy shoulders that looked like they were straining the seams of the suit jacket he wore. When the portrait was painted, he had a neatly trimmed Van Dyke beard and a full head of stark white hair brushed back with a part in the middle. His skin was dark and leathery because he spent most of his time outdoors in the sun.

I didn't like looking up at him often because his dark brown eyes seemed to follow me about the room, and he wasn't smiling in the portrait. In fact, he looked angry, I thought. When I asked Mommy if he was angry or upset about having to sit for a portrait, she told me that people took their pictures and portraits very seriously in those days and believed smiling made them look frivolous. To me, he always looked like someone who was incapable of smiling, even if he had wanted to smile. He was one spirit I wasn't all that anxious to meet.

Family legend had it that he was hiking alone in the famous Rip Van Winkle Catskills and turned a corner to behold this stretch of land comfortably set between two slopes where once the Sandburg River had run when it was free to race along, unchecked by dams upstream. Now it was more like a creek, albeit often a raging one after heavy spring rains or a winter of particularly heavy snowfalls.

"Your great-great-grandpa Jordan's heart pounded the way a man's heart pounds when he sees a beautiful woman," Mommy told us. "He fell in love with every tree, every blade of grass, every rock he saw, and just knew he had to live here and work his farm here and build his home here, and yes, dear children, my sweet dear and precious twins, die here."

On the north side of the house, he was buried along with our great-great-grandmother Elsie and a child of theirs who had died in childbirth, an unnamed creature of misfortune who had the door of life slammed shut before she could sound a cry, take a breath, behold a color or her mother's face. The three granite tombstones were in a small square created out of fieldstone about three feet high with an entrance. Their stillborn child's gravestone reads INFANT JORDAN and her date of death. There was, of course, no date of birth. Her stone is smaller, with two baby hands embossed in a clasp above the inscription. Mommy says that sometimes when she touches the hands and closes her eyes, she can feel them moving, feel their softness.

The vivid way she described it made me think that the dead reach up through their tombstones to see and hear and even touch the people who come to visit their graves. Mommy's great-grandmother Elsie died before her great-grandfather. Mommy said her mother told her she often saw him hugging the stone as if he was actually hugging his departed wife, and he would kiss it, too!

All of our other family members lay at rest in church cemeteries, except they didn't lie at rest, according to Mommy. They rose almost immediately from their cold, dark graves and began to walk the earth, eager to speak to our grandmother, our mother, and now eagerly waiting to be able to speak with us. That was the prediction Mommy made to us.

"Soon, children, soon, you too will see and hear them. I promise. They've promised. When they feel you're ready, they have promised they will," she told us that day, and she looked out the window with her beautiful angelic smile softly sitting on her full and perfect lips and nodded as only one who had heard the voices would nod.

How could we not believe it would all come true?

Copyright © 2004 by the Vanda General Partnership

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Pocket Star (March 30, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743428625
• ISBN-13: 978-0743428620
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #441,699 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Closer to VC Andrews Pen, April 12, 2004

By	MZ (Novinger, MO United States) - See all my reviews

I enjoyed Celeste, much to my own surprise...

Years ago, I was addicted to the books by V.C. Andrews -- specifically the Flowers in the Attic series and the Heaven series. Andrews could spin a story with mystery, secrets, love, incest -- and all of it would work together so beautifully. Honestly, there are no authors I have found that are comparable in style to V.C. Andrews.

Consequently, I was disappointed with the books that were written "in her honor" after she had passed away. At first they were all right, as if she had outlined them to begin with. Gradually, they didn't hold my interest anymore. They were lacking...something...

Celeste brought back the old feelings that so well reminded me of the author of the spellbinding My Sweet Audrina. As if someone had studied Andrews well enough to truly mimic that style that entrances you to turn page after page.

The storyline promised much -- and made the book a quick read.

What was missing in this book, however, was that ray of light. One bad thing after another befalls Celeste Atwell. I thought by the end that there would be some glimmer of hope for Celeste. I walked away feeling dismal about the entire experience. Will I read Black Cat, the upcoming sequel? Probably. But I wish there had been some small happiness for Celeste in this book - like Heaven's Logan or Cathy's brother Chris.

Anyway, I found this book better than the past few novels in V.C. Andrews' name. The storyline carried the book for me. If you liked Flowers in the Attic, give this one a chance.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Like a REAL VC book...the very best the GW has done., April 2, 2004

By	mickey71 "mickey71" (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews

CELESTE has elements of both Flowers in the Attic and My Sweet Audrina, rather than being just another Heaven rip-off. Celeste's character is intriguing because she honestly believes everything her mother tells her, as opposed to a Dawn-like heroine who KNOWS everyone around her is wacky. Celeste doesn't even realize how traumatized she is. For once, I didn't feel it was the same old character speaking.

Sarah is absolutely nuts, and it's not just "I want to stay young and beautiful forever." It's refreshing to see characters who are not what we'd expect...for instance, I expected the "boy next door" to be a sympathetic character. He's not.

Finally, a reader can easily see why the next two books are NECESSARY, not just filler. All in all, a very satisfying VC experience, which hasn't happened in a long time. (Of course the GW's aggravating writing style such as "Her eyes grew small" is still apparent, but try to ignore it and enjoy the plot.)

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Descent VCA novel, April 6, 2004

By	Cshady "Claire" (USA) - See all my reviews

I decided to give Celeste a try, after giving up on V. C. Andrews years ago, because of the different plot description. I bought it right away and read the story and was moderately impressed, but not to the point where I'm buying V. C. Andrews books again. But, over all, for V. C. Andrews fans, read this book.

The strongest point of this book is that it's different. Yeah, way different from the previous family series and miniseries books. This book reminds me very much of My Sweet Audrina.

The book starts off and continues on for quite some time with Celeste and her brother Noble as kids. Sarah, their mother, insists that she can see spirits, and she wants her children to see them as well. From the beginning, we realize that Sarah favors Nobles much more than Celeste. Even though Celeste's father states that she is the smarter twin, Celeste is the most impressionable one, maybe because she craves to have her mother's attention without realizing it. When Celeste does get the "gift", and not Noble, instead of her mother being fully proud of her, Sarah is silently disappointed that her beloved Noble doesn't have it. She orders Celeste help him achieve his gifts. The responsibility of Noble, and his unpredictable ways, leaves Celeste with a heavy burden, for if she fails, her mother would surely reprimand her, something she does not want.

Tragedy strikes again and again in this novel, and Celeste world keeps going upside down. When her brother Noble dies, her mother snaps, and Sarah convinces herself that her son didn't die. In fact, she convinces herself that Celeste has died (with the help of her "spirits"). This is the part where Celeste's identify is taken and replaced with her dead brother. Of course, this masquerade is not perfect, and things go horribly wrong.

The characters are stronger and more complex in Celeste, and (finally!) I felt something for the main character. But at times I found the plot moved a little too slow, but it made up for the different atmosphere, characters, and situations that this book brought to the table. This book is indeed a breath of fresh air, but I found that it could have been...more? No matter. Most fans who will enjoy it. 3 ½ - 4 stars