Product Details
Simon & Schuster, May 2007
Hardcover, 320 pages
ISBN-10: 1416534571
ISBN-13: 9781416534570
Description
"If you ever want to hide from the world, live in a small city, where everyone seems anonymous."
That's the advice of twelve-year-old Ariella Montero, who lives with her father in Saratoga Springs, New York, in a house haunted more by secrets than by memories. The Society of S traces her journey south, to Asheville and Savannah, and on to Florida, as she learns that everything she knows about her family is a lie.
When she finds her mother, she learns the truth: Ariella is a fledgling member of the Society of S.
S stands for Sanguinists: a sect of environmentalists concerned with ethics and human rights -- although they happen to be vampires. S also stands for synesthete: a person able to see words and letters in colors. The letter S is lucky for Sara, Ariella's mother, who gravitates to cities such as Savannah and Sarasota. But will it be lucky for Ariella?
Susan Hubbard's novel is an intricate literary mystery that raises provocative questions about the way we live now. Ariella's voice will lure you into a world where you'll meet the others among us: vampires who cope with their special nature and need for blood in a variety of ways, ranging from the savage to the mundane to the scientific.
"Susan Hubbard's stories are about the accidents of desire, and the accidents that desire provokes.... Mysterious, comic, and menacing, they combine simplicity and complexity to create an effect of great elegance and power."
-- Charles Baxter
"Susan Hubbard writes with icy precision and a kind of close-focus attention to detail that is too little in evidence these days. In her work, she always gets it right.... Marvelous."
-- Frederick Barthelme
"Equally literate and adventurous, The Society of S discloses its delectable secrets slowly. Susan Hubbard has taken a much-beloved trope and created a coming-of-age novel with real bite."
-- Stewart O'Nan
"What happens when a thirteen-year-old girl, living in the ordinary world we all know, discovers she's a vampire? For Ariella Montero, the star of this dark and imaginative novel, it's a revelation that's both illuminating and unsettling, but also one that leads ultimately to the beginnings of self-knowledge. A triumph of modern gothic storytelling, The Society of S is the most unusual coming of age story you¹ll ever read."
-- Carolyn Parkhust, author of Lost and Found and The Dogs of Babel
Monsters and Critics, February 19, 2009
...Ariella's mother vanished when she was born, leaving the child to be raised by an extremely protective scientist father. As Ari matures into a teenager, she becomes friends with their housekeeper's family and begins to question her own ...
Susan Hubbard's Books
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The Year of DisappearancesNow in paperback, Susan Hubbard continues her heroine’s mysterious and spellbinding quest.Read More
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The Season of RisksAri continues her quest in the turbulent landscape in which competing sects of vampires and their vulnerable mortal counterparts must coexist.Read More
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