Spunky and irreverent, 13-year-old Tayna is every villain's worst nightmare: an uncooperative victim who refuses to play by his rules.After living her entire life in a cruel orphanage, Tayna discovers that she may never have actually been an orphan, and flees from nunnish captivity to search for her real family. But time is running out and she has two entire worlds to search: one filled with shopping malls and televisions, and another filled with Brownies, Djin and magic!
Review:
When the author agreed to send me a copy of this book, I was extremely excited to start reading it, because the premise was so good, yet left me wondering what it meant and how was the story developing around those ideas. When I started this book, back in February, I knew I was holding something special (not my tablet, but what I was looking at in the screen). Unfortunately, life got in the way, school, scouts, exams, reading slumps, so I would like to apologize to the author right now for the long wait for this review. When I was finally able to continue reading this book this month, it was like the world of Tayna had changed completely, because I could not put the book down. It caught my attention from the moment I laid my eyes on the page and I only went to sleep when I had finished the book.
Jefferson Smith has such a lyrical, witty and hilarious writing style, his characters are relatable and compelling and we get so emotionally attached to them that when something happens to one of them we feel it and we suffer with them and we laugh and we think about the meaning they give to this story.
That was something I really enjoyed in 'Strange Places': the phlosophy, the life lessons, the meaning hidden within the words.
There is an adventure around every corner and a new friend to save behind every tree, and in Tayna we find an hilarious and intelligent female main character - one of my favourites, for sure!
Life and death and magic... it all comes together to create a real masterpiece of fiction.
There's something about Jefferson Smith's enormous creativity that just makes us want to absorb every word and even want to live in this world and have Djinn and a Story Uncle as friends to help us out in our ride.
In the end, we are left with a fantastic cliffhanger, that will force everyone to read the sequel when it comes out.
To finish of this review, I will highlight this amazing event that happened from the first page to the last: both Tayna and the author's writing developed as we, readers, got more and more imersed in the story.
So, without any other words in the english language to tell you how I felt about this book, I'll just ensure you that if I ever find a fisical copy of this book in a bookshop, I will definitely buy it to support this incredible writer... and I will definitely want to read the sequel and Smith's other works!
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| The author with his daughters, who had a very important role in this book. http://creativityhacker.ca/ |
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