Pearl — Clay Gilbert

Pearl wants peace more than anything. She wishes she could find someone who wouldn't mind having someone like her around, but that's never going to happen. She's alone, except for the animals in the woods she's called home now for a year. Even if they're scared of her strength, her speed, her sharp teeth, and nails, or her strange silver eyes, they don't judge. At least they don't call her a monster. At ten years old, she's never had a friend beside the doctor who helped her escape a laboratory cage; never had a father or mother outside of her dreams. Then one day, a stranger moves into the empty house across from the cabin she's lived in for the year she's been on her own.Everyone told Matthew Chandler he was crazy to abandon life as a California lawyer and move to a house in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee to build a new career from the success of his first novel. Matt Chandler likes proving people wrong. At this point, his only family's twenty miles away, and he figures the only children he'll ever have will be the books he writes. Then one day, a child he could not have imagined crosses his path, changing his notions of family and of humanity.But Matt and Pearl still have to live with the world, and the people who will stop at nothing to unravel the mystery of Pearl's young life, even if that means taking it away.