The First Day of Spring (Relié)

Meet Chrissie... Chrissie is eight and she has a secret : she has just killed a boy. The feeling made her belly fizz like soda pop. Her playmates are tearful and their mothers are terrified, keeping them locked up indoors. But Chrissie rules the roost—she's the champion of handstands and wall walking and almost everything else. Best of all, now she has a feeling of power that she never gets at home, where food is scarce and attention scarcer.
Twenty years later, Chrissie is living in hiding under a changed name, doing all she can to forget who she used to be. But the past is starting to catch up with her, threatening to take away the one thing she cares about : her five-year-old daughter, Molly. Nancy Tucker leaves the reader breathless as she inhabits her protagonist with a shocking authenticity that moves one from sympathy to humor to horror to heartbreak and back again.