About the Book

"I'd like to chop off my head.  I'll donate it to the Halloween shop, the mask of Aubrey Clover."

“I don’t know if I’m a girl dreaming about being a monster, or a monster dreaming about being a girl.”

Twelve-year-old orphan Aubrey Clover, born with a rare disfiguring bone disease, dreams about finding a friend who accepts her, maybe someone like Edward Scissorhands.  Wanting to stay in dreams and disappear and drift off into cold outer space, she can’t make the warm inner core inside her vanish before her thirteenth birthday.  This day marks her transformation.  She believes she will turn into a werewolf.

A few months before her birthday, she meets her father for the first time and goes to live with him in Atlanta.  Aubrey wishes she could live with her hero, director Tim Burton instead.  However, she finds herself with a father who is unable to accept his misfit daughter.  Growing up in foster homes in the New Mexico desert, Aubrey can’t relate to her surroundings or her new school until she meets Travis Edwards.  A fifteen-year-old outsider who wears 3-D glasses, Travis croons Destination Moon like Nat “King” Cole, dresses like Frank Sinatra, shares Aubrey’s love of sci-fi movies, and yearns to feel warmth.  Together on the fringe of society, they help one another find a place to fit in.

Unfortunately, his friendship is not enough as she is continually tormented at school and in life.  As her birthday approaches, Aubrey starts to wonder if fantasies are the only place she will ever be truly accepted.

Fantasy and reality blur in The Mask of Aubrey Clover.  Blending tragedy with humor, it is a fable about misjudging people based on their appearance.