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I. Loved. This. Book.

More than I expected to love this book.

I started reading it at work, I work as a customer service rep, and when things are slow, rather than doing things that require a lot of bandwidth (like watching Netflix) I read my ebooks. I'd been dying to read this book, so I started it at work and had no idea what I was in for. In the end, I stopped reading this at work because it was a book that demanded my full attention and I found it hard to go back and forth between calls and this book. That's a good thing. I ordered this from Thrift Books and started reading on my bus ride everyday.

This book is broken up into 4 individual parts. Stories that can be read on their own and stand in how powerful they are on their own, or that can be read together, in any configuration to create an amazing story all based around a spiral. My favorite arc was the second - the girl in puritan times - but I found all the stories equally enthralling and beautiful. I even called my grandpa and told him he needed to read this book stat. The only section I found slightly difficult to get into at first was the last - mostly because it took place in the future - which meant there was some world building that had to be done that didn't...really..have to be done in the others because you just knew what time period they were from.

The way Sedgwick writes women is phenomenal, he doesn't seem to prescribe to the view many men have when they write women is in order to have a strong female character they must go through something traumatic. He writes characters of both genders with ease, and I'm in awe of how beautifully he's mastered his craft. If I haven't convinced you yet, read this book. It's amazing.

These stories are too grim to say I enjoyed them. But I like the way they fitted together, I liked the spiral motif, I liked the scope from  pre-recorded history to space exploration of the future. Madness and death.

Library copy

Four stories: all unique and all tied together with the central theme of spirals. I have to say that I loved two of the stories, liked one of them and the remaining story, I was speechless at the end. To see the central theme in the stories, it could plainly be seen in some of the stories but in others, it was as clear as mud. What was so amazing to me was how different the stories were and how the author tried to loop them together. I think I would have enjoyed the stories just as much without the central theme threading them together, as I felt it really didn’t add much to the stories. So what’s your opinion or theory on spirals, I really didn’t have one until I read this book.

The stories I loved was Whispers in the Dark and The Easiest Room in Hell. In Whispers in the Dark, this story was told in verse and I loved the way that this story played out.   The girl desperately wants to be the one who makes magic for her village and is determined to get the job done. In The Easiest Room in Hell, the human spirit is alive and the book’s cover is revealed. The Witch in the Water, I really liked but I wished there would have been something unique added to it and The Song of Destiny, well I followed along with this story until the end and then in the final pages, it lost me. I understand what it was saying, but what?!? really, come on, this really cannot be happening in the final moments. This is my first book by Marcus Sedgwick and I liked his writing and his imagination, I will have to see what else he has out there.