Ultraviolet

August 8, 2011
In a change of pace from her Faery Hunters series, Anderson blends paranormal, science fiction, and scientific elements in an intriguing story about a teenager who is convinced that she’s crazy—and a murderer—though reality is even more unpredictable. Sixteen-year-old Alison Jeffries awakens in the psych ward of a hospital, and is soon transferred to a treatment center for “youth in crisis.” The police, meanwhile, believe Alison knows something about the disappearance of her classmate, Tori. She does. Alison had watched Tori disintegrate before her eyes, and she believes that her barely understood “powers” are to blame. With the help of Sebastian Faraday, a mysterious neuropsychologist, Alison starts to get answers: she is a synesthete—her senses of smell, taste, sight, and hearing intertwined in surprising ways—as well as a tetrachromat, able to perceive ultraviolet light. Alison’s conditions allow the author to give her some enviable abilities and use some creative descriptions (Faraday’s voice tastes, to Alison, like “ark chocolate, poured over velvet). Anderson keeps readers guessing throughout with several twists, including a very unexpected divergence in the last third of the book. Ages 12–up.

August 1, 2011

Gr 10 Up-Alison, 16, wakes up in a mental hospital, her tangled memories offering glimpses of a struggle and horrible death of a classmate. Readers learn that she believes she caused her classmate to disintegrate, that she has confessed to this, and that the student is now missing. What follows is much more than a harrowing adolescent-in-pysch-hospital "problem book" than one might expect. For one thing, Alison has synesthesia, a neurological condition in which the stimulation of one sense leads to experience in one or more other senses. For example, the teen can taste lies and see colors nobody else can. She also has an eidetic memory and other enhanced perceptions. Synesthesia is a recognized phenomenon often associated with creativity, and is not itself a mental illness. Alison learns that she is gifted, not insane, from a young man studying her condition who is not who he claims to be. Once his origins are revealed, the story loses some of its pace and originality, and things are tied up a little too neatly at the end, but Ultraviolet is still a first-rate read.-Corinne Henning-Sachs, Walker Memorial Library, Westbrook, ME

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