![]() And within a fairy-realm, a sad and lovely changeling boy named Gideon longs to escape the capricious Shee-queen, Summer.įisher gets the series up and running deftly. (“There’s nothing I wouldn’t do,” he declares, “no one I wouldn’t sacrifice!”) There’s also Sarah, a visitor from the future who wants to use the mirror to save her broken world. The large cast of characters includes the roguish hero, Jake, a present-day teenager who gets himself expelled from school so he can (yes) save his lost father and a morally ambiguous Arctic explorer named Oberon Venn, who is desperate to bring his wife back from the dead. The problem is, though no one really knows how to use this remarkable device, everyone wants to control it. ![]() The Chronoptika, as the mirror is known, is a time machine that can send people into the past. The premise of Fisher’s latest novel, “Obsidian Mirror,” the first in a trilogy, involves an ancient mirror with enormous and rather sinister powers. With “Incarceron,” she hit on a conceit that passes the narcissistic grandiosity test with flying colors: a hero caught in a living prison that’s been sealed for centuries, and a heroine trapped in an oppressive social order itself frozen in time. In Britain, her many other books have also attracted praise, and she’s been a finalist for the prestigious Whitbread Children’s Book Prize. Both “Incarceron” and its sequel, “Sapphique,” were New York Times best sellers. The Welsh writer Catherine Fisher is already an established figure on the Y.A. Their binding commitment to self-seriousness and minimal irony, handled well, can accomplish moving stories grounded in psychological frankness, vulnerability and compassion. Truly excellent ones - Philip Pullman’s “Golden Compass,” Suzanne Collins’s “Hunger Games,” John Green’s “Fault in Our Stars” - are saturated in a strangeness and emotional intensity unmatched by most contemporary adult novels. ![]() novels is straightforward, writing a good one is anything but. Often, they’re either escaping from or saving their parents if they discover a way to do both simultaneously, even better.īut if the formula for Y.A. fiction tend to live in special worlds, somehow set apart from those of other people. Good young adult novels must therefore reflect and dramatize the reader’s fantasy of being victimized and misunderstood, yet secretly possessed of powers that allow mastery of one’s destiny. Adolescents are, of course, at a developmental stage in which a certain level of passionate self-involvement is the norm. All successful novels for young adults must pass what one might call a narcissistic grandiosity test.
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