I am so far behind.
This’ll be another quick one even though The Glass Sentence is really, really good and deserves more of a review.
I think this novel ended up in my to-read list after it popped up on one of the ubiquitous beginning-of-season blog lists put out by The Millions or the like. I read the short post, then the blurb on Goodreads. It sounded like My Kind of Book. And this time, it was!
The Glass Sentence is a YA fantasy adventure book about a girl named Sophia and her uncle Shadrack, a cartologer (okay, mapmaker). Several years before timelines had been split along geographical lines around the world in an event they call The Great Disruption. One area might be 19th-century society while not too far away, there’d be dinosaurs. An interesting idea. This new version of the world is still being mapped by people like Shadrack: adventuring mapmakers, including Sophia’s parents, who disappeared somewhere halfway around the world. Sophia doesn’t even know what time they’re in. The government of New Occident, where Sophia lives, has decided to close the borders, and her parents don’t have their papers to get back in, so Sophia and Shadrack decide to go looking for them before that happens. When Shadrack is suddenly kidnapped and taken somewhere north. Sophia, now on her own and with only a few clues and a map left by Shadrack, ends up on a train headed south to figure out what happened to Shadrack and her parents. Things Continue to Happen.
My biggest (and, really, only) complaint about this book is that there seem to be too many Things Happening – and in ways that seem ill-timed and a bit awkwardly done. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed this adventure. The closest books I can compare it to are Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, which I also loved (though with the religious agenda replaced with a political one, but meh). It’s a dark adventure fantasy that only gets darker and more adventurous the farther you get into it. I read it really quickly because I didn’t want to put it down. It really is a fun novel.
I’m generally not a huge fan of YA series, but I’m instantly hooked on this one. The Glass Sentence is the first of a trilogy that Goodreads is calling The Mapmakers Trilogy. The next one is called The Golden Specific, according to Goodreads, and it will be released next year. I can’t wait!
In Puppy News, things are progressing. Zelda has serious stick-wielding skillz.
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