Me (and) Me

Written by Alice Kuipers

HarperCollins Canada

9781443448826

288 pp.

Ages 14+

April 2017

Lark Hardy’s seventeenth birthday should’ve been a fun day, and it had begun that way, a first date with Alec Sandcross canoeing at Pike Lake.  But one moment changes everything.  As the teens are about to embark on some swimming, a cry from Suzanne Fields, the mother of five-year-old Annabelle whom Lark had babysat, draws their attention to the child face down in the water. Alec dives in but hits his head and starts going down.  And as Suzanne yells at Lark to do something, the teen hesitates, not knowing whom to save.  So begins a novel split in two voices, both Larks and both Lark’s.

The first Lark begins to describe the days after the near drowning in which Alec has been saved and Annabelle lays in a hospital bed in a coma. Alec and Lark’s new relationship is blossoming, and he begins to teach her how to do parkour, climbing, running and jumping across obstacles such as buildings and bridges. Becoming so entwined with the attentive and charismatic Alec, Lark starts blowing off best friend Lucy and bandmates Nifty, Reid and Iona to spend time with Alec.  When she starts getting weird messages on her phone about Alec not being saved, Lark is disconcerted but has no answers. But when she visits Annabelle in the hospital, and hallucinates that she’s drowning in water and then glimpses a girl who is but isn’t her, Lark starts to think she’s going crazy.

In an alternate voice and chapters, a second Lark, one who cuts her hair short and dyes it red, recounts those same days, but ones in which music exec Martin Fields and wife Suzanne are ever grateful to her for saving their young daughter while Alec’s family sits by his hospital bedside, contemplating turning off the machines that are keeping him alive.  Lark still harbours much anger about her mother’s passing and translates that anger into petty shoplifting of items she doesn’t even want.  But though this Lark is starting to connect with bandmate Reid, she too is baffled by freaky messages including those of a not-hospital bound Alec and an intimate relationship with him.

Lark, whether the long- and dark-haired one or she of the red hair, have similar circumstances: a musical mother who has passed; a dad with heart issues; best friend Lucy; a passion for writing songs; and playing with bandmates Reid, Iona and Nifty.  She is also starting to suspect she’s losing it, seeing things like imaginary water near drowning her and disappearing messages.

The linchpin for Lark becomes the lyrics her mother started penning before her death.

Perhaps you see it differently
You and me
It’s just a case of who tells the story
Perhaps you see it differently. (pg. 86)

Showering her intense text with astounding lyrics, Alice Kuipers  brings both Larks together to juxtapose the parallel lives they lead after the near drowning at the lake.  Confused by grief, fears and even guilt, both girls (or are they really two?) attempt to make sense of a world in which their own choices for actions have consequences that they wish they could undo.  They are two halves of the same whole, different but similar. They are Me (and) Me.  (There’s even a crazy moment when the two face off and shout, “Who even are you?” “Who the hell are you?”; pg. 240) It’s hard to say whether the two will come together equally, though Lark recognizes that,

I have to stitch myself back together.  I have to make myself whole. (pg. 270)

or whether Lark will become more of one than the other.  However, it’s clear that Alice Kuipers in her daring storytelling and almost maternal concern for her characters wants to help keep Lark together. Life is hard enough without questioning your decisions, especially those made under pressure, and when literally being torn apart by them.  I can’t tell you how it ends (you’ll see when you read Me (and) Me) but I can tell you that the story comes full circle, secured in its own way, though not tied up as you might expect.

Check back tomorrow for my Me (and) Me blog tour stop with a guest post by author Alice Kuipers.  Ever enlightening, Alice Kuipers speaks about why she writes YA.

The Darkest Magic: A Book of Spirits and Thieves, Book 2

by Morgan Rhodes

Razorbill

978-1-59514-761-5

426 pp.

Ages 12+

June 2016

When Morgan Rhodes began this series as a spin-off of her Falling Kingdoms fantasy, I had no idea that it would be even more complicated that that award-winning series. (Read the first four books in that series – Falling Kingdoms, A Rebel Spring, Gathering Darkness, and  Frozen Tides  – and experience the fullness of the high fantasy of Mytica and beyond.) In the first book in this new series, A Book of Spirits and Thieves (Razorbill, 2015), Morgan Rhodes took readers beyond that Falling Kingdoms world and juxtaposed it with our modern one, by creating a complicated story that fused the very best elements of fantasy and parallel worlds.  Well, hold on to your hats (or your cloak's hood) because The Darkest Magic takes the reader into darker worlds in which secrets revealed just beget more secrets and everyone is chasing after something or someone.

In Mytica, Maddox has learned that he is the son of the mortal Barnabas and the immortal Eva, though he’d always been raised to believe Damaris, who is revealed to be Barnabas’s sister, was his mother. After Goran, the henchman of the goddess Valoria, murders Damaris, they are more determined to seek out Valoria’s scribe to learn of her weaknesses.  Unfortunately, Maddox and company arrive just as the scribe, Alsander Verus, is executed by Valoria for treason. Unthwarted, the trio rescue his head which Maddox brings back to life, getting the torso-less scribe to help them by agreeing to reunite his head with his body. Together, Maddox, Barnabas, the witch Liana and Al head (no pun intended) first to central Mytica to seek help from Princess Cassia who lost her inherited throne to the murderous Valoria and then to southern Mytica where Valoria’s sister and nemesis, the immortal goddess Cleiona, regins.

Meanwhile, in modern-day Toronto, Becca Hatcher, who still dreams of her time with Maddox in Mytica, and older sister Crys are hiding out with their mother Julia Hatcher, aunt Jackie Kendall and professor Dr. Uriah Vega at the Yorkville penthouse of Angus Balthazar, magic expert and friend of their aunt Jackie’s.  The group is working to try to decipher the Codex, the book that Valoria calls the Book of the Immortals, in an attempt to foil Markus King’s evil machinations to restore his full magic and ensure his immortality as a death god.  Wait, it gets more complicated.  They realize that Becca, who learns soon enough that she is actually the daughter of Jackie and Markus, is inexplicably linked to the book, painfully wounded when Jackie tries to destroy it. Worse yet, Markus, who ensures obedience from members of the secret Hawkspear Society, is once again exerting control over Crys’s mom as well as upping his influence over rich bad boy Farrell Grayson–weirdly romantically involved with Crys–and putting Crys in more danger.

I haven’t even mentioned the surprising arrival of Damen Winter whose evil intents surpass Markus’s and whose appearance has mortals and immortals clamouring to action in both Toronto and Mytica.

Keeping track of Morgan Rhodes’s characters in Mytica, in Crys’s and Farrell’s worlds, as well as their storylines, is a daunting feat but readers worthy of the challenge will be justly rewarded. As Farrell’s dead brother, Connor, suggests to him, "The higher the price, the better the reward." (pg. 278) So it is with keeping the multitude of plots, relationships and secrets clearly separated whilst they start converging.  The Darkest Magic is a skein of magical plots that occasionally get knotted together but will ultimately be unravelled in true Morgan Rhodes’s fashion.  There is insight and humour,

     Farrell’s not a killer, she reminded herself over and over, like some sort of twisted mantra.  “He’s an asshole, a misogynist, and a spoiled brat,” she allowed out loud, “but he’s not a killer.”
     “Aw, come on.”  The front door clicked shut behind her.  “You shouldn’t give me so many compliments,” Farrell said. “They’re going to go to my head.” (pg. 331)

and lessons to learn about family and trust and obedience.

You are the master of your destiny.  No one else. (pg. 61)

The Darkest Magic is a full package, a very full package, and one that Morgan Rhodes delivers with poise and skillfulness and imagination. And there’s still Book 3 to come. Perfect.