Nora Brooke drowned last year. Her heart stopped: long enough to leave, deep inside, a shadow of death that opened her to other shadows. Coming to Holdfast Island for remedial school, Nora finds a garden in the woods: an old, overgrown prison yard. She enters by a gate that then vanishes, glimpses a restless figure who is suddenly gone, and finds thousands of blue flowers like watching eyes. She finds friends, especially irrepressible Jack McKie...