Kyland

“She’s fierce. She’s loyal. She’s a fighter. She smells like wildflowers and mixes mountain talk with SAT words. And she’s so unbelievably beautiful…hopeful, smart, fiery, tenderhearted Tenleigh Falyn deserved a life better than the scraping and struggling she’d always done…Half agony, half hope. Half pain, half ecstasy. Half grief, half joy. Half my downfall, half my savior…My love for her was fear and pain, and joy and laughter. It was spring flowers and winter frost.” “I knew I’d never seen a more beautiful vision than Tenleigh Falyn standing in a field of lavender” in the midst of properties “strewn with garbage–just another way the people in Dennville exhibited their defeat…most yards were buried under a pile of crap–a good metaphor for most lives in these parts…in a place like Dennville, Kentucky, Darwin was the one who had his facts straight: only the strong survived…The things you did to survive were the most personal of all–the fight to live would humble you in ways you didn’t ever want anyone else to know about…Sometimes it was ugly and shameful and beautiful and courageous all at once.” “There were a thousand different ways a person could give up, and Kyland hadn’t chosen any of them.” In Monopoly, he insisted, “The shoe represents hard work. And hard work leads to riches. I’m always the shoe…Life could injure you, but you could get up again if you were strong enough, and especially if you had the right person to help you out…Maybe we all reacted to stories differently based on our own hearts.” Kyland stole mine!