Harley Quinn: Redemption (DC Icons Series, Band 3) - Hardcover

Allen, Rachael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 059342994X ISBN 13: 9780593429945

Verlag: Random House Books for Young Readers, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

When girls in Gotham City go missing, Harley Quinn is determined to track down their kidnapper. But the only way to outsmart a villain is to engage in a little villainy herself. Don't miss the adrenaline-racing conclusion to the Harley Quinn trilogy.

In Gotham City even the heroes are wicked.

Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy can't wait to cross off the final items on their summer bucket list. They still need to:

• Go to Pride
• Get mani/pedis
• Figure out how they can kiss without Ivy's toxic lips killing Harley. (Every relationship has its challenges!)

But their to-do list gets more dangerous when young girls vanish from the streets of Gotham City. The only clues left behind are the dolls on Harley's doorstep from a mysterious sender known as the Dollmaker. The message is clear: come find me…if you dare.

Award-winning author Rachael Allen delivers the fast-paced and fiercely feminist conclusion to the Harley Quinn trilogy.

“Allen’s Harley is a fierce, righteous, brilliant, and preternaturally brace ball of chaos. I loved and feared every single minute with her.” –Dahlia Adler, author of Cool for the Summer

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rachael Allen is a scientist by day and kid lit author by night. She is the winner of the 2019 Georgia Young Adult Author of the Year award, and her books include 17 First Kisses, The Revenge Playbook, The Summer of Impossibilities, and A Taxonomy of Love, which was a Junior Library Guild and 2018 Books All Young Georgians Should Read selection. Rachael lives in Decatur, Georgia, with two children and two sled dogs.

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Chapter 1


Science experiments that involve kissing should be a lot more fun. Ivy, my girlfriend, my G-I-R-L-F-R-I-E-N-D of exactly twenty-nine days and four hours, purses her lips and leans forward. Her hair glistens in the sunlight, and she smells like summer and overripe peaches. Her lips look soft and so very kissable.

And . . . I pull out a box of cotton swabs. (No. Fun. At all.)

“Think about me!” I tell her.

The puckering takes on a smiley shape. I run a swab across her lips and then carefully open her mouth so I can make small circles on the insides of her cheeks as I count to five.

“Perfect!” I remove the swab and stuff it in a tube filled with clear media. “Now think about Woodrue!”

I take another kiss sample with a fresh swab.

“Now think about kissing Catwoman!”

“Wait, what?”

“Kidding! Think about me again.”

Another swab.

I vortex all the vials to homogenize the samples, and then I spin them down so I can run the toxicity assay. Please work. Please work. Please work this time. It’s important to distract myself, because if I don’t, I’ll start thinking about the letters. And what comes with the letters. So I keep my eyes on the centrifuge as it works its way up to 10,000 g. While I’m doing my science, Ivy repots some begonias that she rescued (read: stole) from the nearby home improvement store because “the poor babies had root rot and they needed someone to take care of them.” Her conservatory--the place where we’re working--is unreal. Like a jungle ate a science lab and then settled down in a Victorian solarium. The walls are so thick with greenery, you can hardly see them, and the ceiling is retractable glass.

Also? There are lab benches with science equipment and a sitting area for relaxing and shelves filled so tall with books that you have to use a vine-covered ladder to reach them. (I honestly still haven’t been able to decide if the ladder is alive--the last time I was stretching out my fingers to grab a book just beyond reach, it SHOT OUT A VINE to help me.)

And then there are the flowers as big as people and the vines hung thick with mysterious fruit and the ones that smell like death or cinnamon or banana pudding. This place feels like a mythical parallel world--something hidden and primordial. Our own personal oasis on the outskirts of Gotham City. A break from the horrors that find their way to my campus mailbox. I have been here two days, and I never want to leave.

“Have your professors posted grades yet?” Ivy asks as she makes cuttings of her Monstera deliciosa. (It has a ton of white patches and streaks within its tropical green leaves, which apparently makes it some kind of celebrity in the plant community.)

I shake my head and do another rinse step for my assay. “No.” I say it like I’m personally offended, because I am. “And refreshing every ten minutes doesn’t make the grades appear.”

Ivy smirks. “Cruel and unusual.”

It really is. I’ve been working like a fiend to make all A’s so I can get into a top-tier med school, even while the darkness at the back of my mind whispers that I could do more good by putting on my Harley costume and taking to the streets.

“What are you thinking about?” asks Ivy.

I blush. “Nothing.”

It’s not that I think she’d judge me, but it’s one thing to do some fun and nefarious secret missions on the side, and it’s entirely another to say you’re considering them as a whole life plan/alternate career. Especially when all you have is some amorphous picture in your head of tearing through Gotham City by night with glitterbombs and truth bombs and actual bombs, and not, like, a specific plan of how this entire set-up would work or what the point would be. It’s better to tell her when I have a solid plan. Yep. I’m sure an epiphany about my life goals will strike any day now.

Just then, the Isleys’ housekeeper bustles in with a monogrammed cheese board straight out of a magazine. Baked brie. Fig jam. Fruit I don’t even know the names of.

“Thanks, Dorothy,” says Ivy kindly.

I choke out a “thank you” too. I wish I could feel more comfortable around this woman, who is almost like a mother to Ivy. But I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to people waiting on me.

The minute I leave the conservatory and set foot on the rest of the Isley estate (because it’s definitely not just a house, this place), I’m reminded of exactly how different Ivy and I are. When she found out I didn’t have a place to stay during that awkward week between spring and summer semester when they don’t let students live in the dorms, she didn’t hesitate--I just had to stay with her at Hawthorne.

Do I have to call it Hawthorne?

She rolled her eyes. “Only in front of my parents. I used to try to think up awful nicknames just to piss them off,” she continued, and I grinned. “But they’re going to be away at their Tuscan villa all summer, a fact that my mother has worked into conversation ad nauseam with everyone from the neighbors to our dentist, which means we’ll get the house to ourselves.”

Ivy looked positively gleeful. At the thought of them leaving? At the thought of me coming to stay? Probably both.

And because I adore her, I only teased her a little about how I didn’t realize “to ourselves” meant us plus a staff of seven.

Ivy sprinkles the cheese board with edible flowers, and I abruptly stop spacing out because (A) Ivy, and (B) cheese.

I walk over to the sitting area to pop a bite of baked brie into my mouth and eat a couple of round berries the color of an egg yolk.

“So, you think it’ll work this time?” asks Ivy.

“The cheese? It’s definitely working.”

I give my belly a comical rub, but she doesn’t laugh.

“The experiment.” Ivy tucks her legs underneath her and picks at some pomegranate arils.

“Are you kidding?! It’s totally gonna work!” I hype myself up so I can hype her up. Don’t let the doubts slither into my brain. The whispers that tell me we’ve been trying for months and we thought we’d have it figured out in weeks. The shadows that hiss that it may be impossible, and what are we going to do then? Oops, guess the doubts slithered in after all.

I leap up from the table. “HEY, WHAT’S THIS?”

Ivy glances at me. “Huh?”

“These flowers.” I point at the furry pink cotton balls that strongly resemble the trees in a children’s book my mom used to read to me. “I’m, like, fascinated by them. What are they?”

“I know what you’re doing.” The left side of Ivy’s mouth curves upward.

“What? Showing an interest in your hobbies? Being curious about nature’s wonders?”

“Distracting me.”

“Is it working?”

She can’t help but crack a grin. “Yes.”

“So . . . what are they?”

“Mimosa trees.” She walks over and plucks one of the fluffy pink flowers. She holds it out to me. “Smell it.”

I breathe in, and then I sigh out because these flowers, wow. “They’re amazing. Like honey and almonds and a summer breeze, and something spicy I can’t quite put my finger on.”

...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House Books for Young Readers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 059342994X
• ISBN 13: 9780593429945
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Purmerul LTD; https://strengholt.nl/en/; ; 22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9; Plovdiv; Bulgarien