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|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | TEEN FICTION BIC | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Wildwood Library (Mahtomedi) | TEEN FICTION BIC | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
In the tradition of Memento and Inception comes a thrilling and scary young adult novel about blurred reality where characters in a story find that a deadly and horrifying world exists in the space between the written lines.Emma Lindsay has problems: no parents, a crazy guardian, and all those times when she blinks away, dropping into other lives so surreal it's as if the story of her life bleeds into theirs. But one thing Emma has never doubted is that she's real.Then she writes "White Space," which turns out to be a dead ringer for part of an unfinished novel by a long-dead writer. In the novel, characters travel between different stories. When Emma blinks, she might be doing the same.Before long, she's dropped into the very story she thought she'd written. Emma meets other kids like her. They discover that they may be nothing more than characters written into being for a very specific purpose. What they must uncover is why they've been brought to this place, before someone pens their end.
Author Notes
Ilsa J. Bick is a child psychiatrist, film scholar, former Air Force major, and now a full-time author. Her critically acclaimed, award-winning YA novels include The Ashes Trilogy, Draw the Dark , Drowning Instinct , and The Sin-Eater's Confession . Ilsa currently lives in rural Wisconsin, near a Hebrew cemetery. One thing she loves about the neighbors: they're very quiet and only come around for sugar once in a blue moon.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bick (the Ashes trilogy) launches the Dark Passages series with this ambitious meta-textual adventure, which invokes Stephen King levels of psychological and physical horror, while defying readers' perceptions of reality at every turn. After a car accident, Emma Lindsay is inexplicably trapped in a valley with a handful of other teenagers, unable to escape the pervasive fog and the monsters hidden within. As Emma and her companions attempt to escape, they're thrust into a series of shifting realities based on the works of a deceased author, where no one and nothing are as they seem. Faced with unsettling revelations and disturbing questions, they must fight for their lives and determine what's real and what's fiction. Though the story starts off slowly, and the often-shifting perspective makes it hard to empathize with many characters, things pick up considerably once the heroes start unraveling the underlying mystery. While Bick does an excellent job at conveying tension, atmosphere, and the multi-layered premise, the epic length, frequent character-hopping, and convoluted action detract from an otherwise intriguing tale. Ages 14-up. Agent: Jennifer Laughran, Andrea Brown Literary Agency. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
Eric felt blood welling from the fresh wound on his cheek. I'm real; I'm bleeding; you can't bleed if you're not real..." Eight strangers are lost in a fog, hunted by the stuff of nightmares. One little girl knows where they are, trapped in the space between their stories, but she may not be what she seems. A gory, unwieldy experiment in puppet-master horror and multiverse theory. (c) Copyright 2014. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
It's an interesting premise: Emma Lindsayhas been called into Professor Kramer's office to face his charge of plagiarism. She has written a short story virtually identical to portions of deceased author Frank McDermott's unfinished novel, Satan's Skin. Yet she has never seen the novel, which is stowed away in Edinburgh. How could she copy a portion of a novel she didn't know existed? Is this yet another blink a lapse in Emma's daily routine that takes her into other realities, a possible side effect of the plates in her skull? With allusions to The Matrix, The Bell Jar, and The Shining, to name a few, Bick forces readers to face a complex question: Are Emma and others in the story simply characters in one or more books who somehow got trapped together in the white spaces between pages? Or are they real people? This is hardly an easy read. Bick pushes readers, moving between story lines and points of view with little uniting the disparate threads except Emma herself. With incessant violence and gore, this series starter is for the most hard-core connoisseurs of horror or world-shifting fiction.--Bradburn, Frances Copyright 2014 Booklist
School Library Journal Review
Gr 9 Up-One of the marks of a classic horror story is the slow and insidious shifting of the rules within the tale's universe. Bick understands the power of this trope and uses it relentlessly in this sophisticated horror novel for older teens. A brilliant five-year-old watches her novelist father call horrors from a powerful mirror. A high school junior with static-filled gaps in her memory pens a horror tale, one that had already been written decades ago. A psychically gifted girl accepts a ride from a troubled but sweet boy. A marine and his younger brother head out on snowmobiles after accidentally killing their abusive father. Fleeing their separate nightmares, the cast assembles in a fog-bound, snow-filled valley from which there seems to be no escape. Lovecraft-inspired monsters inflict gruesome deaths and time and space are unreliable in this mind-bending narrative. Slowly, it's revealed that no one is quite who they thought they were, and the boundaries of this universe are definitely falling apart. Continuous references to fictional time and space travelers (The Matrix's Neo, A Wrinkle in Time's Meg Murray) add intricacy, leading characters to wonder if they themselves are made up. Bick is a master of the genre, balancing tension, terror, and tedium through repetition and fractured storytelling. White Space is filled with echoes of other horror stories, but the author manages to hold on to her own narrative voice, playing on readers' expectations through a series of reveals, some just predictable enough to inspire a false sense of security. The first of a series, it also can stand alone.-Katya Schapiro, Brooklyn Public Library (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
When what's real keeps shifting in monstrous ways, can Emma find her way home? Can she even hold on to sanity and self? With a head full of metal that causes migraines and occasional blackouts, 17-year-old Emma makes the best of her life at Holten Prep until one of her teachers accuses her of plagiarizing a dead writer's unfinished and inaccessible manuscript. Taking off on a trip with her friend Lily, Emma gets caught in a freak snowstorm, and she finds her survival, her fate and even her past entwined with those of seven strangers. Reality keeps shifting, and motifs keep repeating, and everything is tied to dead horror author Frank McDermott and the bizarre and bloody way he wrote his stories. Can Emma and her companions escape the monster he released? Bick's doorstopper mixes provocative ideas from Inkheart and the movies The Matrix and Inception with a little Charles Dickens, but it doesn't give readers much in the way of character or plot to hang onto through huge swaths of the tale. Quick cuts between short chapters with cliffhanger endings attempt to keep pages turning; instead, they offer ample opportunity to put this overlong and often confusing first of another gargantuan trilogy down and move on to something more immediately engaging and sustained. Fans who can forgive the downer ending can look forward to a historical-thriller sequel shortly (or longly, as the case will surely be). (Horror. 14 up)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
