Seventeen-year-old Chelsea Price is facing yet another boring summer in Massachusetts with her dad when she stumbles upon an old shoebox hidden in the back of a closet. Inside is a letter that changes her life.
Chelsea had always been told that her mother died when she was 3. “Of a brief illness,” her father said. Her discovery casts doubt on everything she knows about the world, for it now seems possible that Catherine Eversole Price, Chelsea’s mother, might still be alive. And Chelsea is determined to find her.
Chelsea’s journey takes her to a forbidding black concrete building at the corner of Houston and Bowery in Manhattan. This is the Underground, the place to hear cutting-edge underground music, a club famous for launching careers. It also has played an integral role in Chelsea’s family history.
Chelsea finds that Catherine’s presence haunts not just the room that once belonged to her, but also the dark, brooding club owner named Hence. Chelsea and the reader are drawn into the past as alternating chapters slowly reveal the passionate love at the heart of Catherine’s life. It is up to Chelsea, with the help of an aspiring young musician named Cooper, to unravel the clues to her mother’s fate.
Author April Lindner, a professor of English, gives readers an original, fresh retelling of Wuthering Heights with Catherine. Teen readers are likely to enjoy Catherine and Hence’s romance so much they’ll be eager to read about Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, those enduring characters that inspired this modern mystery.
