Passenger
Gr 9 Up-Readers will need to be familiar with The Marbury Lens (Feiwel & Friends, 2010) to fully appreciate Passenger. When Jack and his friend Connor leave to spend their junior year at a boarding school in England, they decide to cleave the Marbury lens in two, leaving one half with their younger friends Ben and Griffin in California. They meant to make things right, not to destroy them. Alas, by shattering the lens, they find that their out-of-control visits to Marbury become blacker, bleaker, and more foul than ever before. The "not-world" of Marbury is clearly related to their everyday hometown, populated by some of the same people, but suffering the aftermath of war and plague. People can be dead in one reality, but alive in another. Friends can become enemies. Violence is the normal state, and skulls and severed body parts serve as decorations and jewelry. Jack narrates, but he often refers to himself in the third person, as if viewing events as an outsider. He likens Marbury to nesting dolls-worlds within worlds-and all of the Marbury levels are gruesome and horrifying. Every so often, Jack surfaces in the "real" world, just long enough to vomit and realize that he needs to go back to Marbury, to try to rescue Ben and Griffin, and find Connor, who is sometimes with the enemy forces, and other times a friend. This book is for readers strong of stomach, willing to walk with Jack and Connor to the edge of sanity. Their willingness to suffer for each other, and to try to see to the safe return of Ben and Griffin, are small rays of hope in a book otherwise as dark as they come.-Maggie Knapp, Trinity Valley School, Fort Worth, TXα(c) Copyright 2011.  Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc.  No redistribution permitted.