Fisher, Catherine. Obsidian Mirror. Fic. Chronoptika Series. Dial, 2013. 384p. $17.99. 978-0-8037-3969-7. OUTSTANDING. GRADES 8-12.
Oberon Venn, famous explorer and adventurer, owns a time machine: an obsidian mirror with the power to literally suck people out of the present and into the past. Living as a recluse in his ancestral home, Whitcome Abbey, Venn is obsessed with traveling back in time to save his wife from her tragic death. His seclusion is disrupted by the arrival of his teenage godson, Jake, and soon other characters show up unexpectedly: a girl from the future who bears an eerie resemblance to Venn’s wife, a scar-faced man who owned the mirror in the Victorian era, and a sinister fairy queen waiting for her chance to possess Venn, body and soul. The reader will identify most with the Everyman character in the story, a high school teacher, who reacts as any rational person would to the crazy games with time and magic going on at the abbey. Fisher, author of Incarceron (2010), has created another page-turner with well-developed characters and a keen sense of historical setting, science fiction, and fantasy. Review based on an ARC.
Katrina Bergen, Dixon PL