Billie Standish Was Here by Nancy Crocker

When Miss Lydia’s son Curtis rapes Billie (in a scene that is emotionally powerful but graphically minimal), Miss Lydia promises her that she will not be hurt again.

In the absence of anyone else, she forms a friendship with her 80-something-year-old neighbor, Lydia Jenkins. In the 1960s, in rural Missouri, Billie Standish is the 11-year-old daughter in one of only two families that don’t abandon the town when the river threatens to overflow the levees. What makes us who we are? Can love conquer all? What makes friends into enemies and enemies friends?īillie Standish Was Here by Nancy Crocker, 2007 I was haunted by its themes for a long while afterwards. Physical response to emotions.Īt 619 pages, this book seemed short for how fast the story moved and how gripping the ideas were. Some additional memory-jogging tags: Survival. Wanderer also inherits another unexpected obstacle from her host – the extremely strong emotion of love for her brother Jamie and boyfriend Jared that eventually leads her to be willing to sacrifice her own life to find them and then to save them. From a small corner of consciousness, she thwarts Wanderer’s attempts to read her memory to find the rest of her human companions. On a mission to Chicago to find her cousin she believes is still human, Melanie is captured by the souls and becomes host to Wanderer, a soul that has lived on seven other planets in seven other forms of beings. At first, such deception was necessary so the humans would be unaware of their invasion, but by the time of this story, most humans are already hosts and such behavior is unnecessary and yet still practiced. The souls, as the alien life-forms are called, take over the human body and adapt the human lifestyle. Our world has been invaded by a parasitic life form and most humans are extinct, though you wouldn’t know it by just looking.

Billie Standish Was Here by Nancy Crocker