Sneak Peek Saturday: The Life Of Glass

The Life Of Glass

By: Jillian Cantor

Pub date: February 9th, 2010

Before he died, Melissa’s father told her about stars. He told her that the brightest stars weren’t always the most beautiful—that if people took the time to look at the smaller stars, if they looked with a telescope at the true essence of the star, they would find real beauty. But even though Melissa knows that beauty isn’t only skin deep, the people around her don’t seem to feel that way. There’s her gorgeous sister Ashley who will barely acknowledge Melissa at school, there's her best friend Ryan, who may be falling in love with the sophisticated Courtney, and there’s Melissa’s mother who’s dating someone new, someone who Melissa knows will never be able to replace her father.

To make sure she doesn’t lose her father completely, Melissa spends her time trying to piece together the last of his secrets and completing a journal her father began—one about love and relationships and the remarkable ways people find one another. But when tragedy strikes, Melissa has to start living and loving in the present, as she realizes that being beautiful on the outside doesn't mean you can't be beautiful on the inside.
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Chapter One

The last thing my father ever told me was that it takes glass a million years to decay. I knew it was true because my father always knew things like that, strange sorts of things that no one else cared to remember or learn in the first place. Before he got sick, he was writing a book called Strange Love, which apparently references some song he and my mother had loved in the eighties, and also the fact that the book was all about his obsession with bizarre tidbits of information and unusual love stories. He'd only written two chapters when he was diagnosed with lung cancer, but he had a journal of notes already waiting.


My father has never smoked a day in his life, so there was a strange fact just wrapped up in his diagnosis. It was something that made him laugh, an odd sort of laugh, a snort snarl that reminded me of an angry dog and only stopped when my mother started sobbing quietly into her hands. My sister, Ashley, and I had shared a plastic chair in the back of Dr.Singh's office, our bare summer legs touching. It was cold enough in there that we both had goose bumps. This was four years ago, when I was only ten and Ashley was twelve, and it was the first time I'd ever seen my mother cry, so I knew something terrible was about to happen.
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Amazing. I can't wait to purchase this book in a few days. To read the remainder of this awesome first chapter go here. You can also find five other chapters attached to that! Also, find out more about Jillian here and here.