It’s a young adult tale of adventure, magic and fantasy wrapped in the lure of promises, bargains and healing for Madeline, a high school senior whose been given three months to live. The story is very good; however, the underlying theme of socialism often intrudes and overtakes the story.
The two-part adventure opens with Madeline clinging to a garden trellis “straining to breathe.” The doctor had told her to “enjoy her last spring” and she had snuck into the back garden “without telling anyone,” also without a way to call for help. She didn’t want her boyfriend Darius to feel sorry for her, had broken up with him and left her phone inside because he wouldn’t stop calling and texting.
That’s when Madeline saw a strange appearing older woman with “grey hair sticking out like straws of an overworked broom.” A coughing episode had left Madeline gasping for air when the woman approached and asked for a moment of her time.
The strange looking woman ignored her distress and instead showed Madeline three items she’d found in the garden and asked if she could borrow them. If Madelina agreed she would give her “three favors and one piece of advice” in return. The items were trash to Madeline and she told the woman to “take them,” but please call her mother to help her and the adventure begins.
Madeline couldn’t know how valuable the women’s promises would become. She didn’t know she would soon meet a mysterious stranger named Hanali, the hidden cost of a bargain she would soon make or the price her best friend Jason Wu would pay. She had yet to learn who the Scim were and why she was recruited to war against them alongside other young humans in crisis or the rules of magic that brought life or death and the ability to make little things big and big things small.
The story is captivating, the setting and characterizations believable and well done; however the heavy-handed message of socialism on pages 299, 300, 319 and 369 pulls the reader into a world of politics which shatters the mystique of the story.
Otherwise the story would be a nine on a scale of one to ten instead of a five.
