The Dark Divine Sneak Peek

Have we got a treat for you: exclusive excerpts from Bree Despain’s teen paranormal debut, The Dark Divine. Every week for the next six weeks, we’ll be posting a chapter to whet your appetites for the book’s release on December 22.

Plus, we’ve got stuff to give away! Every Friday we’ll select a winner to receive a copy of The Dark Divine, and a bottle of nail polish that perfectly matches the purple book cover. To enter, email Elissa@RTBookReviews.com.

Read on for a message from Bree, and then click the link below to read the first chapter of The Dark Divine.

Dear RT Book Reviews Readers,

I truly believe the saying “No book lives until it is read.” The author crafts a story using her own experiences and imaginings, but it is the reader who breathes life into the story. That is why I am overjoyed about The Romantic Times’ exclusive preview of the first six chapters of my debut novel, The Dark Divine. Not only are they easing my anticipation a few weeks early, but they are also making it possible for their readers—some of the most passionate in the world — to be among the first to make The Dark Divine come to life.

This story started with a storm of ideas that had been swirling in my head for several weeks, and finally came together when I was stopped at a traffic light, thinking about a teenage memory that had always haunted me: the day my long lost childhood friend came back into my life for a few hours — just long enough to throw me off kilter — and then disappeared again. I looked up at a billboard in the dark, and a conversation between a brother and sister started in my head. They were discussing a former friend who had suddenly returned to town. “He’s dangerous,” the brother warned his sister. “He’s not the person he used to be. You have to stay away from him.”

I couldn’t stop thinking about this conversation, and I was so curious about the friend who had disappeared and why he’d come back. I’d never felt so much passion for a set of characters before, and I knew that I had to write their story. I wrote the entire first chapter of The Dark Divine in a notebook the day after I heard the conversation between the brother and sister in my head, and besides a few minor tweaks, the first chapter has remained almost exactly the same as how I first wrote it. My friend had seemed troubled, and I’d always wondered if I could have helped him in some way. And the conversation between the brother and sister (which became the third scene in chapter one) was an exploration of what might have been my family’s reaction to my getting involved. But the most surprising thing that came out of chapter one, was that I discovered that the brother may know why their friend had disappeared, but he refused to tell that dark secret.

I hope that you will read, enjoy, and share these exclusive excerpts from The Dark Divine over the next few weeks. And thank you for helping make my characters and story finally live.

Love,

Bree Despain

Read The Dark Divine preview here!