YOUNG ADULT
Mortal Sight
Sandra Fernandez Rhoads, Enclave Escape (APR 14) Hardcover $22.99 (304pp), 978-1-62184-120-3
In Sandra Fernandez Rhoads’s young adult fantasy, Mortal Sight, an ambitious teenager directs her unearthly powers to destroying vicious monsters, endangering the lives of those around her.
Since she was seven, Cera and her mother have always moved just before her birthday. Close to her seventeenth birthday, Cera has a prophetic vision of her friend in fatal danger; it is accompanied by agonizing emotions and throbbing pain.
Cera rushes to save her friend; to do so, she has to fight off a monstrous demon bird whose screech rings loud. Cera fights not to shout or throw up, but the encounter sends her world spinning. She collapses, and Maddox, whom she just met, appears; together, they run from the beast. Maddox leads her to a community of people with similar powers where she learns about her destiny.
The uncertainty surrounding Cera’s destiny drives the novel. In the beginning, Cera is unsure of why she’s having frightening visions. When she meets others like her, she has to learn where she belongs. When the rest of the cast realize who she is, and what others like her are capable of, she comes to seem a threat, her presence putting the safe haven in jeopardy.
The book’s descriptions of Cera’s visions and the monsters she encounters are horrifying, evoking a sense of the impending threat. Cera and the group she’s joined remain alert for possible attacks. As Cera grapples to make sense of everything happening to her, lines from John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, guide her, their events and characters echoed in her own story.
Mortal Sight is an absorbing fantasy about a teenager’s struggle to discover her destiny.
The Best Week That Never Happened
Dallas Woodburn, Month9books (APR 21) Softcover $15.99 (301pp), 978-1-951710-11-8
In Dallas Woodburn’s magical story of young love, The Best Week That Never Happened, two childhood soulmates, Tegan and Kai, are reunited after a tragic event, opening the door to forgiveness, grace, and healing.
As a child, Tegan visited Hawaii with her parents and met Kai, an artistic, sensitive Hawaiian who introduced her to the beauty of the islands. Their joyful friendship promised to bloom into something more. When Tegan returned home, she and Kai kept corresponding, but close to her high school graduation, Tegan made a decision that wounded Kai and put their relationship in jeopardy. The book’s tension rises as a tragedy and a series of strange events lead up to the best, and most mysterious, week of Tegan and Kai’s lives.
Against a vibrant backdrop of Hawaii’s awe-inspiring beauty, the story moves between the teenagers’ angst and the glory they feel in being young and in love. Tegan narrates, her voice poignant as she explores love’s many facets and expressions. The breakdown of her parents’ marriage adds to her confusion, revealing the vulnerability and courage that love requires. After the tragedy, dreams blur the edges of her reality; she wakes again and again not at home, but in Hawaii, with no memory or record of having traveled there. With their love for each other deepening and their time together running out, Tegan and Kai become desperate to forestall their final separation. Their ultimate solution is satisfying, if somewhat expected.
With its subtle blend of magic and reality, The Best Week That Never Happened reveals much about the power of love to rise above obstacles that seem insurmountable.
The Dark Tide
Alicia Jasinska, Sourcebooks Fire (JUN 2) Hardcover $17.99 (336pp), 978-1-72820-998-2
An enthralling fantasy drenched in magic, Alicia Jasinska’s The Dark Tide pushes and pulls its heroines to their limits.
The island city of Caldella is imperiled as the sea claws at its banks. Every year, the tide demands a sacrifice: a boy chosen by the Witch Queen to be chained in the city square and drowned under the full moon.
Lina fears that her brother will be selected. She seeks out the only person to have escaped a witch queen’s clutches: Thomas, who was spared when the previous queen chose to sacrifice herself in his place.
Eva, the new Witch Queen, is desperate to quell the tide. Embittered by her sister’s death, Eva sealed her heart away and cast it into the sea, determined to never succumb to the same weakness. When she spies Thomas at the festival, she selects him as the sacrifice, holding him responsible for her sister’s death.
Out of her love for Thomas, Lina storms the palace, offering herself in his place. Eva accepts the trade, hoping it will make Thomas suffer as she has, but soon finds her heartlessness put to the test. As the moon waxes and the water rises, the young women must decide what their sacrifice will be: each other or their city.
Lina and Eva are perfect foils for one another, gaining and relinquishing the upper hand in turns. Lina is a romantic who fancies herself a tragic heroine; Eva is cold and guarded, placing her duty to her city above all else. Their relationship builds with tension and delight.
Caldella is rich and dark, juxtaposing resplendence with the macabre. A festival to honor the sacrifice is bedecked in flowers and ribbons; magic is strained from blood and bone or woven into knots with strands of hair. Striking the perfect balance, The Dark Tide demands to be read in one held breath as its tide bears down on all.