So I was given the proper blessing to go ahead and publish the Booklist starred review for my next-up novel, Passenger.
One down for Jack and his friends. And enemies. It's always nice for an author to get that first honest-to-goodness review overwith in a positive way -- kind of like pulling off a Band-Aid or something.
In any event, here it is, with my sincere thanks to Ian Chipman and the folks at Booklist:
Oct 2012. 480 p. Feiwel and Friends, hardcover, $17.99. (9781250004871).
Things got mighty grim for Jack in
The Marbury Lens (2010), but it seems that being abducted by a
sexual predator and then sucked through a set of glasses, in and out of
the ruined wasteland of Marbury, was just the first circle of the hell.
Jack decides, along with friends Conner, Ben,
and Griffin, to destroy the glasses, but smashing the lens only results
in fracturing the boundaries between worlds and shuttling Jack and crew
through progressively more tortured realities, where savage creatures
hunt down boys and disfigured corpses outpopulate
the living. The first book's emotionally eviscerating gut-punch came
mostly from Jack’s tormented wavering between the real world and
Marbury. This followup becomes almost completely unmoored from reality's
anchor, an experimentally crazy tour through a junk-sick
fever dream comprised of Jack’s anguish, guilt, anger, grief, and
self-loathing. The drawn-out, hellish trip is told in frantic,
convulsive prose that festers around the nauseating horrors Jack
witnesses in Marbury and the traumatic psychological wounds he
can’t stop prying open. Where it all leads to both surprises and
recalibrates what the whole trauma-drama has been about. Or not. Smith
is hardly afraid to leave things open ended, unspoken, and all the more
memorable for it. With this uncompromising two-book
saga, Smith has securely carved out his spot on the darkest fringes of
YA lit.
— Ian Chipman
