by Brian Keaney
FROM THE BOOK JACKET:
"Dante looked around, making sure there was no one who might overhear him. Then he leaned forward and, lowering his voice, said, 'I still have dreams.'"
"It was the most shocking thing Bea had ever heard. 'Dr. Sigmundus says that disturbances of the mind which come to people when they sleep are the result of a psychic illness,' she replied."
"It was what she had been taught at school, and for as long as she could remember."
In Tarnegar, a sinister island where the laws of the mysterious Dr. Sigmundus hold sway, dreaming will get you locked up, branded a lunatic and a danger to all who know you.
Dante is a lowly kitchen boy. Bea is the privileged daughter of physicians. They aren't meant to meet or share ideas or, most dangerous of all, their dreams. But with the arrival of a notorious prisoner to the island's asylum, their worlds collide. Together they begin to question whether the promises they've based their lives on have been spun from lies and illusion--and if now is the time to break them.
"The Hollow People" opens a window on the unseen worlds that surround us. It is the first installment in The Promises of Dr. Sigmundus. => http://amzn.to/qP3zzS
On Saturday, the Journal’s Meghan Cox Gurdon, who covers kids books for the paper, wrote a story called “Darkness Too Visible” in which she argued that fiction aimed at young adults in recent years had become rife with pathologies. “[K]idnapping and pederasty and incest and brutal beatings are now just part of the run of things in novels directed, broadly speaking, at children from the ages of 12 to 18,” she wrote. => http://on.wsj.com/kUUeID
"A heroine with spunk and spirit offers an inspiring lesson in perseverance and hope. First-rate."
"Connor has created a winning and positive father-figure/daughter relationship."
Read more ... or .... buy it from Amazon
The University of St Andrews has a fair number of successful writers on its staff: poets, academics, novelists. But strolling the streets of the town, risking conversations with eccentric bird men, you’ll find Foz Meadows, an Australian-born young adult writer and author of Solace and Grief, the first of a trilogy, published in 2010. In March, Foz, gave an engaging talk to the University’s Literary Society about why Young Adult (YA) fiction matters. I talked to her about the genre of YA and her life as a writer. => http://bit.ly/lzbBb7
