Review: YA portal science fantasy with survivalist theme and diary style
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 10 28, 2012
And it works beautifully may I add: First of all you need to like quiet and shy heroines who haven't really developed a plan for their own future yet. Cass is not repressed, she is simply fairly bookish and not massively attractive and so she has had a best girlfriend and she has had some experience with boys, but her main emotional stay and stumble-block is her mother (divorced) and in some ways her younger brother - at least when I consider the number of times they are mentioned.You NEED to like Cass in the first 100 pages - first of all because they are mostly her alone, dealing with the situation she finds herself in, trying to survive and second because this is a diary entry book in first person. If you don't like her voice and herself you won't like the rest of the trilogy either. When she gets found and taken to the other planet, she reports on her conversations as well, but it is always pre-selected according to what she remembers or wants to remember or when she has time to write it down.I really enjoyed the situation that rescuing Cass was just a side-effect of a regular exploration by the Tare Setari (the psychic space ninjas that are mentioned in the description ^^ - quite correctly) on their old homeworld of Muina, which has been deserted for thousands of years (and why that is so and how that will change is a major part of the plot).She is also not the only stray that has ever wandered through the tears in space into a different part of the universe, so the Tare bureaucratic machinery originally treats her like they treat all strays. But then an accident happens that makes it clear, she just isn't and can't afford to be treated as such.Luckily Cass has common sense (!) and a strong sense of humour which helps a lot in what happens next. And eventually she finds people who see her as more than a stray or even the Touchstone she becomes, they see her as Cass.(Teaser Excerpt from my GoodReads review of the Smashwords edition).ETA: For all you readers who want a bit more Touchstone Trilogy: Andrea released a free Gratuitous Epilogue (which is named exactly that) at Smashwords - it's 150 pages of what happens after and happy end. I would have paid money for this and would pay for a continuation, too, even though everything of the current plot is resolved in the Trilogy itself.