Author: Shelley Davidow
Publisher: Hague Publishing
Rating: WORTHY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review.
This novel owes a lot to the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind but it's not that movie in written form, and if you stop reading after the first few chapters thinking you know where it's going, you'll be sorely mistaken.
Lucy Wright had a great life until that night she was driving the car in which her mother was a passenger, and some jerk ran a truck right into them head on. Lu woke up in hospital to discover that her mother was dead and she could feel nothing below her waist. From that point on, things got worse. She seemed to lose all her friends, because she couldn't stand to hear their pity, if nothing else. She dropped out of school and became home-schooled instead, which is often a sorry sign, but not aways, and not in her case. Her boyfriend stopped visiting without explanation, and her only friend seemed to be Nelson - a girl who was so-named because her abusive father had wanted a son. And pretty soon, Nel is hooking up with Craig, her ex. But Lu is fine with that. She thinks.
The only thing it seems which has kept Lu from finishing the job the jack-ass driver failed to do that night is the weird experiences she has had down by Emerald Creek: the very lights of the title. Lu had been learning the cello - another thing that seemed to go down the tubes after her accident, but now she feels a compulsion to bring it out and start playing again. That's no big deal until she takes it down to the creek one night and discovers that she can, in fact, communicate, after a fashion, with the lights. She thinks she can understand "the music of the spheres" and pretty soon she's online searching for information about what she's experiencing.
That's how she meets up with Jonathan Barkley, also a music lover, and the close encounter the two of them have isn't with space-ships and cartoon-ish aliens, but with another realm, another place somewhere, and with people just like her, and with one woman who seems to be the very embodiment of evil. Is Lu the only person who can stop her? If you want to know how to write an intelligent and mature teen romance (no that's not a paradox), ask Shelley Davidow. This is a smart, traveled, inventive and competent writer, who is unafraid to take you on a journey which in less capable and experienced hands might have been slippery territory. Not here. Not on Davidow's watch. Here's a story which is, refreshingly, not set in what far too many YA authors think is the center of the universe: the USA. It stretches its wings from Australia to Scotland to Norway - and to, er, elsewhere. And it has a truly independent and strong female main character whose name is definitely not Mary Sue. This was so refreshing.
I read this like it was going out of style. It's not. On the contrary, it's apparently coming into style, since it's volume one of the Emerald Creek series. I don't consider it perfectly well-written, there was the odd niggle and annoyance for me here and there, but overall it was excellent, and if you can get a cantankerous curmudgeon like me to 'need to read' what you've written, you know you have a winner on your hands. I've had to wade through some real clunkers this month so far, and it's finding a gem like this which makes all that wading worthwhile. I recommend this novel and look forward to the next volume. And I hope if Davidow is looking for beta readers for her next project, she'll consider me as a candidate! Yes, she's that good.
