About the Book
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.
-- "Journal"
About the Author :
Ilsa J. Bick is a child psychiatrist, as well as a film scholar, surgeon wannabe, former Air Force major, and an award-winning, best-selling author of short stories, e-books, and novels. She has written extensively in the Star Trek, Battletech, Mechwarrior: Dark Age, and Shadowrun universes. Her original stories have been featured in numerous anthologies, magazines and online venues. Ilsa's YA paranormal, Draw the Dark, was also a semifinalist for the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award (as Stalag Winter). Ilsa currently lives with her family and other furry creatures in rural Wisconsin and across the street from the local Hebrew cemetery. One thing she loves about the neighbors: They're very quiet and come around for sugar only once in a blue moon.
Review :
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. --School Library Journal
-- "Journal"
There is a crazy lady living in Lizzie's attic. It is quite clear to her that the crazy lady is something out of her Dad's writings. When Lizzie catches her father metamorphosing into a demon-like creature, Lizzie's mother sets the barn ablaze destroying the writings and her father. Years later Emma Lindsay submits for class the story about kids stranded in a spooky house during a blizzard. Unfortunately, it is the unfinished manuscript written by Frank McDermott. No one has seen the unfinished manuscript since Frank McDermott's murder. Emma begins to question her reality; her life begins to parallel McDermott's storyline. Maybe she is one of his characters released from his pages. Chapters are written in voices of each of the central characters and go back and forth in time. Readers will be captivated by the entwined storylines and eerie mystery in this first book of The Dark Passages series. --Library Media Connection
-- "Journal"
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When Frank McDermott's young daughter, Lizzie, overhears a conversation between her parents about Frank's unfinished works, she is frightened; when she sneaks from the house to the barn where he works, she witnesses horrific events involving a transformation of her father into a monster. When her mother burns the barn down and leaves with Lizzie, readers meet Emma, the other main character. Emma's professor, Kramer, threatens to fail her because she plagiarized (or did she?) the famous writer Frank McDermott's work. But Emma never read the book, so where did her thoughts come from? Are Emma's thoughts and ideas coming from within her, from her blackouts--called 'blinks'--that take her into alternate worlds? Emma meets a series of other characters: Eric and Casey, brothers who have escaped an abusive father by shooting him; Rima, whose mother is an alcoholic who tried to kill her; Bode and Chad, who are enlisted in the Army; and Tania, who is really Anita. All the characters try to escape monsters and other horrifying creatures unleashed from the white space, and Lizzie eventually shows Emma how to pull her own stories from white space, which is a blank page waiting to be written with symbols and ideas.
Emma is the thread that binds the entire story together and uses a cynosure as a way to focus and show the way for all the characters to follow to escape the horrors. The characters are well written, the descriptions of the horrors they witness are blood curling, and the end is a shocker. She has lived through a difficult experience, and her mind is helping her escape it. This is a fascinating, intricate story with multiple threads running through it. It is a combination of mystery, science fiction, and horror--an exciting page-turner. Readers will devour it and want the next book immediately. --starred, The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books
-- "Journal"
