Young Deirdre Gage. She has typical California pastimes. She jogs, she eats health food, takes ballet lessons- and communicates with spirits. Namely, a brother, a tragic suicide, and surprisingly, a long-dead Japanese novelist. Suddenly Deirdre is launched on a wild, perilous journey toward self-discovery and beyond. Her journey ends in a lonely hotel room. Within waits danger, delight, and the sweet temptation of oblivion.
Winner of the Philip K. Dick Award, Strange Toys is a stunningly original and penetrating novel blending the real and unreal, the fantastic and the mundane, in a story of love, power, and the occult that carries one young woman on a difficult and dangerous journey. Pet is her name. At nine, she is struggling to protect her family from the horrors predicted in her strange older sister's book of secrets horrors that indeed come true. At sixteen, Pet is hunting down her older sister to wreak vengeance or something else. At thirty, Pet attains strength and power enough to protect her from the present but not from her sister's raging past. With humor, insight, compassion, and unrelenting suspense, Patricia Geary's Strange Toys takes the reader on parallel tours into the world of the supernatural and into the life of a young woman struggling to make peace with the known and unknown.