Darkest Light: coming soon to our blog

Today, Penguin Canada uploaded the book trailer for Darkest Light, the sequel to Hiromi Goto's Half World (Puffin, 2009).  When Half World was released, it won acclaim from all sectors, winning the Carl Brandon Parallax Award (for speculative fiction) and the 2010 Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic (Young Adult category), and was nominated for the White Pine award, the Young Adult Library Services Association (of the ALA) Best Fiction for Young Adults, the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel, and the international IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. (Whew!)

Half World, written by Hiromi Goto and illustrated by Jillian Tamaki, is a dark tale of loss and courage (suggestive to me of a contemporary version of Danté’s Divine Comedy) that bridges different worlds of the flesh and the spirit.  Protagonist Melanie Tamaki is devastated by her mother's death.  As expected, her mother leaves the Realm of the Flesh (our world) to enter Half World (a world of suffering and atonement) until she is welcomed into the Realm of the Spirit.  But the balance of the three worlds has been destroyed and Melanie, a cumbersome girl, must endure the horrors of Half World to re-establish harmony between worlds.

 

In Darkest Light (Razorbill, 2012), many years have passed and Melanie's younger brother, Gee, who was not raised with his sister, enters Half World in search of his past.  Until I have my copy to review, that's about all I can tell you, so I'll let the book trailer entice you instead.

 Uploaded by PenguinCanada to youtube on Feb 8, 2012