Excerpt from The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"That's stupid. I'm right here."

"No, stupid. After you tie me to the tree, you run away. You wait. You know, for kind of a long time. Later you come pretend to rescue me."

"I still think it's stupid," PD said under his breath, unraveling the length of rope.

Joan lowered her voice to a girl-growl. "There are wolves and spikey-haired pigs in these woods, you know," she reminded him.

"I've never seen them." PD lifted the length of thick braided rope from his shoulder. To an onlooker they might have resembled child twins, were it not for the length of Joan's ebony hair. Peter's came only to his shoulders. But their bodies were still young enough to look physically alike—thin and taut, all collarbones and elbows, without any sign of muscle yet.

Jo lodged herself against the great sentry of a fir tree and thrust her arms out behind her. She tilted her head up toward the sky and closed her eyes. "Make sure it's tight. Or it'll be dumb," she said.

PD wrapped the rope twice around her chest and pinned her arms and body to the gnarled wood of the tree. Behind her, he worked on knots he'd improvised himself. When he finished, he stood in front of her and crossed his arms. "Your hair's gonna get sap in it."

Opening one eye, Jo asked her brother, "Wait, do you have something to gag me with?"

PD looked around. He was pretty sure he knew what a gag was, but not entirely. It sounded like it had to do with barfing. But he suspected it was more like in the movies, when someone's mouth was tied shut. "I could tie my socks together?" he offered.

"Do it," she said, and PD set about removing his socks and tying them together, with a knot in the middle that he centered in the hole of his sister's mouth.

"Gaaahhhhhhhr," Jo said.

"What?" PD couldn't understand his sister. "Gaaaaahhhhhhhhhd. Naw Ruhhh Awaaaaawy."

And so her brother Peter ran from the dark woods at dusk back toward their house.

At home, he washed his face and hands. He put on new socks to warm his feet. He ate a cheese sandwich and drank a soda. He turned on the television. Night fell. Somewhere far in the back of his mind, he wondered how long "later" was supposed to be. At seven, his mother asked, Where is Joan? It seemed part of the game. Upstairs reading like always, he said. Take this dinner up to her then, his mother said, your father will be late tonight. And so he took the dinner up and put it in the middle of her bed and shut the door.

The longer he waited, the more interesting the game seemed. Maybe this once he really could save his sister, rather than the other way around. Wasn't she always the one saving him? When he nearly fell off the roof of the house, having climbed up without permission and slipped, dangling from the eaves, didn't she make a pile of leaves and hay and pillows and trash to break his fall? When he got locked in the granary just before the grain fill, didn't she crawl through a sewer, come up through the floor, and get him back out to safety, just before the grain fill siren? When he'd taken up his mother's carving knife to become a real pirate and not a pretend one, slicing open his own forearm, hadn't she pushed so hard on the skin of his arm that it left a bruise, taken off her own shirt, and tied a tourniquet before either of them quite knew what that word meant? He thought of all this as he sat in the living room, watching television, into the night.

Near ten o'clock his mother ushered him with her dish towel toward bed, and told him to tell Joan it was time for lights-out as well. Peter said good night, shut his bedroom door, then climbed out of his window with a flashlight and set out to save Joan.

It wasn't hard to reach the wood. A well-worn path lit up before him. But the wood was dark even in daylight, darker still at night, so finding where they'd left off was a bit more difficult. Tree and wind and night sounds rose and fell. He smelled bark and dirt and wet. He wished he'd brought a coat—the air raised the hair on his arms and he could feel the dampness of the ground cover seeping through his sneakers.

Excerpted from The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch. Copyright © 2017 by Lidia Yuknavitch. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.