Flux

September 1, 2004
Gr 6-9-Nellie is a 12-year-old orphan living in a shack in the Outbacks of a nameless dystopian world. Motivated by hunger, she makes forays into the city, trying to avoid the Skulls, a predatory male gang, as well as operatives of the corrupt Interior, who are responsible for the disappearance and probable death of her mother. The Skulls catch Nellie and shave her head, revealing wormlike scars, reminders of the insidious experiments the Interior has performed on kidnapped Outbacks children. Nellie is a devotee of the Goddess Ivana to whom she attributes the phenomenon of flux, "a quirk in the molecular field" that causes her surroundings to "shapeshift" and allows her body to take "strange wild forms." She has learned how to travel between levels of reality by stepping through hidden gates, a discovery that leads her on a quest for the truth about her mother. She also tries to help Deller, the street-smart leader of the Skulls whom she has befriended, search for his younger brother. The process of traveling between levels creates the problem of doubles-clonelike, unstable human duplicates- and the plot is burdened with confusing and contrived episodes. Lacking descriptive power and atmosphere, this novel uses the plot devices found in Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" series (Knopf) and Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time (Farrar, 1962), fantasies to which it cannot begin to compare.-Susan W. Hunter, Riverside Middle School, Springfield, VT

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