The Girl Who Planted Stars

About this book:

When a meteor crashes into Maeve's overgrown backyard, she doesn't call the authorities—she buries it beside her mother's abandoned hydrangeas. Three months into a grief that has silenced her house and hardened her father into a ghost, the fallen star becomes a secret she tends in the frozen dark. But this is no ordinary rock. It drinks the soil, sprouting filaments of golden light, and when Maeve touches the warmed earth, she feels memories that aren't her own: the terror of falling, the ache of solitude, the desperate need to root.

As the garden erupts in impossible bloom—frost melting in perfect circles, ash smelling of scorched velvet and overripe peaches—Maeve realizes she's not just growing a star. She's growing a way back to the living. But each luminous petal demands a price, and the neighbor's heartache, her father's crumbling silence, and the storm gathering overhead all want a piece of the light. Some wishes require pruning. Some roots must be severed. And the brightest constellations often rise from the darkest dirt.

*The Girl Who Planted Stars* is a luminous fable about the alchemy of grief, the stubborn magic of nurturing something when you've lost everything, and the courage it takes to let the light in—even when it burns. For readers who believed in *The Ocean at the End of the Lane* and *The Night Garden*, this is a story that grows in the cracks of a broken heart.