After Eden, by Helen Douglas

Eden is your average teenage girl: worrying about impending exams, planning parties, hanging out with her friends, balancing study and play. She’s not terribly interested in any of the boys at her school, and when new boy Ryan appears she’s determined not to fall into the same trap all the other girls do: falling head over heels to try and get noticed by him. But Eden soon suspects something’s a little off about Ryan – does he really not know pizza when he sees it, has he really never heard of Hitler? Or is he just teasing her? His accent is a weird mish-mash and he names her best friend Connor as his hero – despite having only met him about two days ago.

The main reason I picked up After Eden was because it is set in Cornwall (my home county), but I was quickly swept up by the mysteries of the storyline as Eden and Ryan were inexorably drawn together. And when Eden uncovers Ryan’s secret, she finds herself caught up in a mission to both change and protect the future. Will they succeed, or is their timeline written in the stars, unchangeable? To say more would be to give away the twist, to reveal Ryan’s secret, but rest assured it’s something a little different to most young adult storylines: no vampires, fairies or werewolves here, only humans and human folly.

Helen Douglas has written a classic YA romance with a nice twist that perfectly straddled the line between predictability and surprise. I could see where some parts of the story were going, but I was completely unable to predict the ultimate outcomes, which was not only refreshing, but meant that it kept my pulse elevated and made me want to keep turning the pages, as Douglas maintained a good pace to the storyline, throwing in a couple of shocks and ‘Aha!’ or ‘Oh no!’ moments here and there.

There are a couple of things I’d like to quibble – such as why Ryan wouldn’t have been better prepared for visiting Eden’s town, or the fact that his very visit could surely have risked delivering to Cornwall the very thing that he was sent there to prevent happening, never mind Eden’s occasional stupidity and thoughtlessness in the things she says just after she’s been outright told the dangers of revealing what she knows – but then, two of these issues help move the story forward to where Douglas needed it to go. If Ryan had been better prepared, would Eden have questioned his story in the first place? Probably not.

Overall though, After Eden ticks all the boxes for a an enjoyable YA read that is both recognizable as typical YA read whilst simultaneously being something a little different from the norm. And apparently there’s going to be an explosive sequel, which I am definitely interested to learn more about and see what is in store for Eden next. Can she and Ryan hide what they know? Will Ryan’s elders come after him for what he has done? Will Eden and Connor ever manage to mend their friendship?

North of Nowhere, by Liz Kessler

In North of Nowhere we meet Mia, who has been dragged away from her friends and down to the sleepy fishing village of Porthaven to help out her gran after her grandad goes missing. She’s bored, she’s lonely, and she doesn’t understand why her Gran has to be so shut off about things. Soon, though, she finds occupation playing with the dog on the beach, makes tentative friends with ‘D’, communicating in writing through the pages of D’s diary, and meets Peter, who’s on a fishing holiday. But then things start to get mysterious: first D fails to turn up for their arranged meeting, then Mia starts to get some funny looks when she mentions visiting the local island where D lives, and then Peter disappears.

This is a really enjoyable read from Cornish-based author Liz Kessler. Porthaven is never specifically referenced as being a Cornish village, but it’s as good as with the name and setting that Kessler has given it. And it’s a rather well-engineered timeslip novel too - I figured out what was going on relatively early in the story, but had to keep reading to find out how everything would work out in the end, and worked out rather nicely it did too. There are little flashback inserts to help entice the reader into the mystery, and everything unfolds very naturally.

I do have a couple of small niggles that my adult brain couldn’t help wondering about whilst I was reading... (i) why Mia isn’t more upset about the disappearance of her grandfather in the first place (and why more isn’t done about it by her mother and grandmother); (ii) why Mia and Peter’s sister don’t tell the adults when they find clues leading to Peter’s disappearance (surely in a real life situation this would be a major issue in a police investigation); and (iii) the ease with which both Mia and Peter’s families accept the outcome and their new reality. However, the addition of detail required by the author to flesh these things out would probably have taken away from the main flow of the story and it is, after all, only a story. And a story with time travel in it too, so I mustn’t get too nitpicky!

Overall, North of Nowhere is a nice little puzzle for young minds to immerse themselves in, and an adventure worthy of any Enid Blyton fan. I especially enjoyed the timeslip aspect of the story and the way several of the different characters got to experience it rather than just witnessing the outcome. I will definitely be picking up more of Liz Kessler’s books in the future.

Shadow of Night, by Deborah Harkness

Since reaching the end of the last sentence on the last page of Deborah Harkness’s debut novel, A Discovery of Witches, I have been itching to get my hands on the sequel - Shadow of Night - to find out what would happen next.

A Discovery of Witches
In A Discovery, we meet Diana, descendant of a powerful family of witches. She, however, has always had trouble with her innate magics so instead of following the family footsteps she chose to become an academic. But it seems that magic is not going to let her forget quite so easily - whilst researching the history of alchemy she discovers a lost text that sets a series of life changing events into motion, and introduces the reader to a world of daemons, vampires, and mystery. Pursued around the world by daemons and vampires, and other witches, Diana is not only forced to face her past, but also deal with quite a bit of trauma in her present.

Reading part one was like peeling the layers of an onion - mystery after mystery, layer after layer revealed themselves the further in I got, and the more intrigued and hooked I became. Harkness introduces so many different ideas and concepts, weaving and binding them together into a compelling and warm story. Its not often a writer manages to combine scientific concepts, history, magic and folklore all in one space.

Shadow of Night
Unwrapping the parcel that my copy of part two arrived in was very exciting. My first impression of Shadow of Night was of heft: this sequel has a pretty serious 768 pages. It begins where A Discovery finished: Diana and her paramour Matthew have travelled back in time to Elizabethan England in an attempt to (a) escape their pursuers, (b) find someone who can help Diana harness her powers, and (c) attempt to uncover the secrets of the book that started everything and that is, of course, the key to everyone’s future. But this, sadly, is where Harkness gets lost.

Harkness, much like Diana, is a history professor, and the result of this is most of the first half of the book basically seems to be an exercise in putting as many famous Elizabethans on the page as possible, from Christopher Marlowe and Walter Raleigh to Queen Elizabeth herself. Consequently, very little happens with the progression of the real story - not until 400+ pages in do they (a) finally meet someone Diana can trust with her magic, and (b) get a sniff at the location of the book they’re hunting. Up until this point it was almost as if they’d forgotten why they’d gone back in time in the first place - they pootle along, finding their feet, alternately making love and arguing with one another. It’s a bit trashy, actually. There are hints of political issues and discussions of witch trials, but none of this is ever explained fully enough to be really effective, which was also a little disappointing. Compared to A Discovery, instead of a dozen lines of thought and intrigue, there is only one, and it’s not particularly intriguing other than in its account of Elizabethan life. A Discovery was full of questions, mystery, the old ‘what’s going to happen next’ in every paragraph, and this is sorely missing from Shadow of Night. What happened to the spider’s web of layers, ideas and action from book one?

As the book progresses, it does pick up, but never quite finds it way like A Discovery of Witches does. Harkness has written in glimpses of what’s happening in the present time, and these work well, showing a set of small ripples that Diana and Matthew have created in time as a result of their travel to the past. There are quite a few ‘timeslip’ novels around, and these always raise the question of cause and effect. Aside from these ‘future’ glimpses Harkness has steadfastly avoided all discussion of such concerns, which is probably wise given the hornet’s nest of problems it can create, though I did feel that she made Diana a bit too blase about the whole thing.

By the end of the book, where are we? Have Diana and Matthew achieved what they set out to do? Yes, although in a rather roundabout way, with just the odd bit of drama here and there. Shadow of Night is worth reading, especially for anyone who loved A Discovery and wants to find out what happens next, as well as for anyone who loves Elizabethan history - just don’t expect the intricacy of book one. And I definitely plan to read part three when it comes out - (a) because I still have a whole load of questions from part one that Shadow of Night hasn’t answered, and (b) because the final ‘future glimpse’ chapter of Shadow indicates a lot of drama and intrigue has yet to be revealed. Fingers crossed that Deborah Harkness has got her yen for Elizabethan history out of her system and part three quickly catches up with the stride and standards introduced in A Discovery.