Reviewed by Candace Cunard for TeensReadToo.com
Fourteen-year-old Sarah Lucas lives a wonderful life. In her youth, she traveled all over the world with her photojournalist parents, and now the family has settled down in a beautiful little farm on the East Coast. Sarah has a constant friend in her older brother, Sam, whose genius intelligence earned him his Ph.D. at eighteen and a job doing research for the mysterious Institute based in California. But Sarah's parents begin to worry about Sam's involvement with the Institute. The project he's working on is top secret, and so is much of the information about the Institute that has hired him. They fly to California to convince Sam to leave his job, but their plane crashes during their return flight, resulting in their deaths.
When Sam returns home for the funeral, he shares information about his research with Sarah, telling her about his experiments to develop a kind of "looking glass" that would allow people and things to be transported between different worlds by enlarging wormholes, tiny passages through spacetime. The newly-orphaned Sarah must deal with her grief, but also with her increasing suspicion that her parents were right about the Institute's sinister intentions for Sam's research. With the help of a strange old lady who appears first as a homeless woman, and later as Sarah's Latin teacher, she learns more about the Institute, and prompts Sam into reexamining the people for whom he works. The culmination of these events results in Sarah and Sam being stranded on an alien world that they reached through the powers of Sam's fully-functioning "looking glass."
Along the way, Sarah meets up with other characters, from this world and elsewhere. I especially loved Angel, the half-gypsy stable hand she meets while living with her aunt and uncle in New York City. The richness of Askounis's characterizations adds flavor to the novel, and real human depth to the conflict, which operates on the level of a grand battle between Good and Evil.
To me, it felt like a cross between the novels of Madeline L'Engle, C. S. Lewis, and Diane Duane, and I would recommend it highly to anyone who enjoys those writers. Like the best of those authors, Askounis writes compelling characters into a significant conflict, and does so with descriptive prose that portrays Earth just as dazzlingly as it delineates the alien world of Oneiros where the novel's climactic events occur.
Fourteen-year-old Sarah Lucas lives a wonderful life. In her youth, she traveled all over the world with her photojournalist parents, and now the family has settled down in a beautiful little farm on the East Coast. Sarah has a constant friend in her older brother, Sam, whose genius intelligence earned him his Ph.D. at eighteen and a job doing research for the mysterious Institute based in California. But Sarah's parents begin to worry about Sam's involvement with the Institute. The project he's working on is top secret, and so is much of the information about the Institute that has hired him. They fly to California to convince Sam to leave his job, but their plane crashes during their return flight, resulting in their deaths.
When Sam returns home for the funeral, he shares information about his research with Sarah, telling her about his experiments to develop a kind of "looking glass" that would allow people and things to be transported between different worlds by enlarging wormholes, tiny passages through spacetime. The newly-orphaned Sarah must deal with her grief, but also with her increasing suspicion that her parents were right about the Institute's sinister intentions for Sam's research. With the help of a strange old lady who appears first as a homeless woman, and later as Sarah's Latin teacher, she learns more about the Institute, and prompts Sam into reexamining the people for whom he works. The culmination of these events results in Sarah and Sam being stranded on an alien world that they reached through the powers of Sam's fully-functioning "looking glass."
Along the way, Sarah meets up with other characters, from this world and elsewhere. I especially loved Angel, the half-gypsy stable hand she meets while living with her aunt and uncle in New York City. The richness of Askounis's characterizations adds flavor to the novel, and real human depth to the conflict, which operates on the level of a grand battle between Good and Evil.
To me, it felt like a cross between the novels of Madeline L'Engle, C. S. Lewis, and Diane Duane, and I would recommend it highly to anyone who enjoys those writers. Like the best of those authors, Askounis writes compelling characters into a significant conflict, and does so with descriptive prose that portrays Earth just as dazzlingly as it delineates the alien world of Oneiros where the novel's climactic events occur.
