The Lost Chord by Lyndi Alexander is a Trick or Treat Bonanza pick #yafantasy #fantasy #giveaway
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    • Oct 6, 2023
    • 5 min read

The Lost Chord by Lyndi Alexander is a Trick or Treat Bonanza pick #yafantasy #fantasy #giveaway



Title: The Lost Chord


Author: Lyndi Alexander


Genre: YA fantasy (with autistic heroine)


Book Blurb:


A poisonous wave is spreading disease and discord across the eleven known universes. Seven special people, known as Keys, must strike the Lost Chord in order to restore the balance.


Among those Keys is Bee Warrick, an autistic teenager from Earth who has traveled between the realms for years without realizing it.


Can Bee help the Conductor find the other Keys before a bitter enemy strikes the wrong chord and shatters the universes?


Excerpt:


Bryony Warrick lined up the semi-precious rocks on her desk again. Hematite, Calcite, Tiger Eye, Malachite, Turquoise, Lapis Lazuli, and a clear crystal Quartz. These certain stones she’d collected over the previous few years varied in color, size and shape; now she knew them all by touch alone. Often at night she took them to bed with her, rubbing them to feel their colors and their healing strength.


“Bee! You’d better be working on your math!”


Bee grimaced and pointed two fingers at her closed bedroom door. “Bzzzzzzzz,” said the slight 15-year-old, wishing her mother would leave her alone. She was perfectly capable of doing her assignment.


Minerals interested her more than geometry. They were important, their exact order, the gifts they brought…she knew that. She just wasn’t sure how.


“Bee! I mean it!” Without knocking, Gina Warrick opened the door. “Do you need help?”


Bee put her head on the desk and covered her ears. “Bzzzzzzzzzzz.”


Her mother sighed. “Fine. I want it in my hands, twenty minutes!” She eyed the rocks and then stepped back out and closed the door.


“Almost,” Bee said. She reached in her desk drawer and took out a heavy plastic container, the kind her mother used to save leftovers, and pried off the lid. It was half filled with sand, colored sand that at one time she’d layered in a bottle at an art fair but had since mixed together so the colors had blended to gray.


She rubbed her fingers together in the sand, her eyes closed, feeling the sensation of the fine crystals against her skin, a ritual performed several times a day—especially before math.


After a few minutes, she felt calm again. With a deep breath, she tucked the sand away and took out her geometry book. She started the first problem, working with a yellow pencil. That was what she always used for math. Yellow was math. Science was blue.


Her brother Reese barged into the room. The tall, broad-built boy plopped down on her bright pink bedspread and dropped his football helmet on the floor, where it rolled in a circle before coming to a stop.


Bee jumped and covered her ears to protect herself from the sound.


"Hey there little sped girl. I see Mom isn't riding you about homework." He glared at her. "Must be nice to be autistic."


"I'm not stupid like you." Bee knew Reese wasn't supposed to call her names. Mom had told him often enough, but he never stopped so now she tossed names back at him.


She wasn't sure what "autistic" was supposed to be. She had read about it in books. She was just what she was, not some word that started with A. Her favorite book was Songs of the Gorilla Nation, about a woman with autism who had learned to communicate with gorillas.


"Stupid is as stupid does," she said.


Reese grimaced at her. He had the same auburn hair as Bee, a color received from their father's genes. She hardly remembered their father. He took Reese away every other weekend, but never took her. She no longer went to the window to look for him.


"Bzzzzzzz," she said, annoyed and wishing Reese would leave.


"You know that's so damn lame. Knock it off. People talk about you at school, sped."


Bee knew that term was derogatory by the tone of Reese's voice, but couldn't understand why it was bad. 'Special' was something extra good, so 'special education' should be something really great, right?


Besides she wasn't in specials any more. Just speech. Her classes were regular, just like everyone else, and she finally didn't have a TSS following her everywhere.


Since she could remember, she had been in occupational therapy. She had swung in a net and glued letters on paper. In hippotherapy, which she loved, she rode and cared for horses at a local farm. In de-sensitizing therapy, which she hated, her mother had scrubbed her body with a surgical sponge for fifteen minutes at a time several times a day.


The longest had been speech therapy, where she had struggled to learn language, a process that was short-circuited somewhere in her brain. So much didn't make sense.


Like special education.


The TSS, Therapeutic Staff Support, had been a string of different women over the years who were supposed to help Bee learn skills to deal with life. Some Bee had liked. Most she had not. One she had hated for pinching her when her mother wasn't looking. They came to her house or sat in class with her at school, always interrupting her thoughts with reminders. Take out your book, Bryony. Push in your chair, Bryony. Do you have your gym shoes, Bryony? The memories made her groan. Why couldn't they call her Bee like everyone else?


"Go away." She turned back to her math, itching to pull out her sand. Once Reese had stolen the box and poured the sand into the carpet. Her mother hadn't been able to afford to buy more for nearly a month. The wait had been agonizing. She nearly failed math that time.


"Make me." Reese stood up and stepped in front of her. Easily six inches taller than she was, he had her trapped in her chair.


She didn't like it. She wanted him to stop.


After considering solutions, she punched Reese in the crotch.


Buy Links (including Goodreads and BookBub):




If you could dress up as anything or anyone this Halloween, what or who would it be and why?


I’m terribly fond of the TV show FIREFLY, and another of my books, SIXSHOOTER, also features a space cowboy—so I think that’s my costume idea. Cowboys are wild and restless—but SPACE! 😊


Explain why your featured book is a treat to read:


This book has a varied cast of characters from several different universes. They travel across time and space, each of them vibrating at a particular frequency, hoping to complete a magical chord that will save them all. Such an adventure, and featuring a girl on the autism spectrum who proves her gifts may be different than the usual, but no less special.


Giveaway –

One lucky reader will win a $75 Amazon gift card



Open internationally.


Runs October 1 – 31


Drawing will be held on November 1.



Author Biography:


Lyndi Alexander always dreamed of faraway worlds and interesting alien contacts. She lives as a post-modern hippie in Asheville, North Carolina, a single mother of her last child of seven, a daughter on the autism spectrum, finding that every day feels a lot like first contact with a new species.


Social Media Links:


Amazon Author Page

Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlexanderLyndi or @AlexanderLyndi

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