Now, instead of living in a warm cottage with a lovely garden, I live on the factory compound. That’s a rather dirty trick.”Ī month ago my life changed forever. It’s a heavy old thing, too fancy to be clipped to his sagging trousers with patched knees, but my mother gave it to him when he graduated from medical school, and he’s worn it every day since. He raises the window curtain and looks toward the front gate of the factory compound, then lifts his pocket watch to the light. My father is standing a few feet from my sleeping pallet. The awful sound ends as abruptly as it began, and I let the pillow fall away from my face. When it’s an emergency, they crash right in. We live above it, and when people need the doctor, they ring a little bell outside the clinic door.

My father runs the factory’s medical clinic, and it’s always open. It’s as much a welcome as a warning if any of them are still in their bunks, it’s going to come out of their pay. The shrill of the whistle goes on and on, calling to the workers. Now there’s no music in my life except in my memories, but that’s okay, because I live there as much as I can. She always used to, until her voice faded to a raspy croak and it hurt her to speak. I fold my pillow over my ears, crush it down, and think of my mother singing me to sleep. Its shriek rips me from a dream of the wind whispering through flowering dogwood trees.

IF I BELIEVED in the devil, I’d give him credit for the shift whistle at the Gochan One factory.

Will she determine whom to trust before the factory explodes, taking her down with it? Excerpt As deadly accidents fuel tensions within the factory, Wen is torn between her growing feelings for Melik, who is enraged at the sadistic factory bosses and the prejudice faced by his people at the hand of Wen’s, and her need to appease the ghost, who is determined to protect her against any threat-real or imagined. At the same time, she is lured by the mystery of the ghost. Guilt-ridden, Wen befriends the Noor, including the outspoken leader, a young man named Melik. And after one of the Noor humiliates Wen, the ghost grants an impulsive wish of hers-brutally. Wen often hears the whisper of a ghost in the slaughterhouse, a ghost who grants wishes to those who need them most. Sixteen-year-old Wen assists her father in his medical clinic, housed in a slaughterhouse staffed by the Noor, men hired as cheap factory labor. A “grisly and satisfying” tale ( Publishers Weekly) inspired by The Phantom of the Opera. This love story for the ages, set in a reimagined industrial Asia, is a little dark, a bit breathless, and completely compelling.

Of Metal and Wishes by Sarah Fine