Black Gate

Made For You
by Melissa Marr
HarperCollins (368 pages, September 2014, $17.99)

Eva Tilling has everything one needs to be the town darling in small-town Jessup, North Carolina: one grandfather is a prominent minister, the other owns a well-known winery, and she has learned the nuances of Southern etiquette. She also has a secret admirer who shows her how much she loves her by running her over with a car.

Eva wakes up in the hospital with more than just broken bones and stitches: she has a new ability to see someone’s death when they touch her. She finds the new ability confusing, but when she touches her friends and discovers they die horrible deaths — and soon — it frightens her. Once people in her social circle start dying, she knows she needs to tell her two best friends her secret so they can use her ability to save their lives and find the killer.

Made for You is Melissa Marr’s (best-selling author of the Wicked Lovely series) attempt at the mystery/thriller genre, and she succeeds. She uses first-person/present-tense to bring immediacy to the story and three points of view to ramp up the tension. Marr definitely tips her hat to classic who-dun-it novels by weaving in just enough details to keep me reading.

As for the characters, I found all of them believable and well-rounded. The author doesn’t shy away from teenage activities (specifically, sex and drinking). The parents are present throughout the second half of the book; Eva’s mother specifically has a relevant back story that adds depth to their relationship.

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High-school junior Alex Wayfare has had visions of the past — usually triggered by a moment of déjà-vu — ever since she was a little girl. These visions feel real to Alex and they cover real historical events (such as Jamestown or the World’s Fair). When she gets hurt during these visions, the wounds (for example, a cat scratch) appear on her body. She wonders if she might be schizophrenic.

After yet another vision — this one of 1920’s Chicago — Alex finds a note from a man named Porter. When Alex meets with him, Porter tells her the visions are real and that Alex is a Descender — a person who can travel back in time through a portal to the afterlife called Limbo.

Not only that, she’s a special sort of Descender called a Transcender. This means that when she travels back in time, she doesn’t become a different person, she drops into one of her own past lives. Porter also tells her that the man who created this technology is after her, and so she is in mortal danger.

This book blends time-travel and reincarnation to give readers a unique twist on each trope. Based on the premise alone, I had high hopes for this book. I wanted to like it. But… well, the novel has good points and bad, and unfortunately the bad outweighed the good for me.

It’s clear MG Buehrlen can write well. The prose flows, and I didn’t stumble over a single sentence or wonder what the author meant to say. The premise is inventive and unique, and the plot is intricate. Wayfare is not-quite-science-fiction, not-quite-fantasy, and not-quite-thriller, and the author does a good job of blending these genres into a coherent narrative.

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The Mark of the Dragonfly
Jaleigh Johnson
Delacorte Books for Young Readers (March 25, 2014, 400 pages, $16.99)

Thirteen-year-old Piper has two goals: make enough money to get away from her impoverished scrapper town and to see the world. She knows it’s unlikely to accomplish either by selling the trinkets that periodically rain from the sky. She’s never known anyone who got rich selling the assorted mysterious artifacts that found their way from other worlds to hers via unexplainable meteor showers. Instead, Piper earns money by working as a machinist. She can fix anything anyone brings her, even objects that other machinists deem beyond hope. She makes enough to survive by fixing mechanical oddities, but she knows that she won’t realize her dreams doing that, either.

When Piper finds a girl with a Dragonfly tattoo on her arm after a meteor storm, Piper believes she has found her ticket out of town. The tattoo signifies the girl — Anna — is protected by the King of the Dragonfly Territories, and so Piper assumes there must be a reward for her return. They escape the scrapper town by jumping aboard the 401, a train that Piper has always dreamed of riding. Once it becomes apparent that Anna isn’t who she seems, Piper must decide which is more important — living her own dreams or protecting a girl with dangerous enemies.

Full disclosure: Johnson and I are both members of the All Rights Reserved writing group. I’ve loved this book since it was nothing more than a map and a vague concept about trains and otherworldly treasures. I’m happy to report that reading Dragonfly in its published form is even more captivating as the first read through.

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Broken Blade
Kelly McCullough
Ace (304 pgs, November 2011, $1.50)

Aral Kingslayer used to be a legend. In another life, he wasa  hired blade for Namera, the goddess of divine justice, and while in that role earned his name. Now that his goddess is dead, his order disbanded, and his compatriots killed, he is a man without a purpose.

Well, unless taking odd jobs to keep his bar tab paid and dodging barbs from his shadow familiar Triss could be called having a purpose. That is, until a lady dressed in red walks into his life with a job offer: deliver a sealed message to a person waiting on a particular balcony at a specified time.

Aral believes this to be an easy job for a man with his unique skill set, and so he accepts. It’s not until he’s almost killed by a man whom he’d thought long dead that he discovers the job is much more than it seems.

Broken Blade is an enjoyable read, even as it doesn’t break any new ground. Assassin novels generally feature a man (check), who has gone rogue for reasonable and/or forgivable reasons (check), who comes to question everything he has known to be true (check). They also feature political intrigue, creative battle/death scenes, and a love interest (check, check, check).

However, one can’t just dump the elements onto the page and expect to get a coherent, entertaining story. An author needs to add a little from each trope and combine them until they make something new, and here McCullough succeeds — he mixes just the right amounts of just the right ingredients to produce a solid novel.

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