The Zen Leaf

Darcy Jones doesn’t have any memory from before she was abandoned at a Chicago firehouse when she was five years old. Since then, she’s lived in a string of foster homes, and has only recently stayed in one long enough to make friends and feel like she’s in an actual home. But then a new boy, Conn, shows up at school, and he seems to both hate her and to be intrigued by her. Darcy has no idea that he is from an alternate world, and that he is there to arrest her as part of a terrorist organization from that world…

This was a weird book. That description doesn’t give it justice. There are two worlds – the one we live in, and the one Conn is from, where the Great Chicago Fire never happened. In Conn’s world, there are a group of creatures called Shades. They all look alike, and they have the ability to “ghost,” or disappear, leaving only their shadows behind. They are hunted by people, and therefore rebel by plotting acts against people in revenge. Supposedly, the Great Chicago Fire in our world happened because Shades were being burned by humans, and then somehow everyone just forgot and/or didn’t pass along the memories of Shades that were now gone. (There is no information about Shades existing, in either world, in other cities.)

Darcy is one of these Shades, except she’s lived as a human in a world that doesn’t know about Shades since she was five. She had no idea why she’s being arrested, or what the world she’s being pulled into is like. She makes a deal with the interworld police, of which Conn is a member, to infiltrate the Shadow Society and find out what their terrorist plans are, in return for the freedom to go back to her own world and live as a human amongst her family and friends. But once she enters the new society, she learns more about how not-black-and-white this issue is, and she starts to remember her childhood, and how to ghost again.

So yeah, like I said, weird book. While the plot sounds weird, it was actually pretty interesting, and the relationship between Darcy and Conn – which continues to grow – was pretty stimulating. On the other hand, the world-building was lacking (as I noted above, there’s no mention of Shades elsewhere, or where they come from, or why they exist, etc), and all the dialog and friendship things were stilted. It was as if the author was writing from a time period twenty years ago, and with only the vaguest idea of how teenagers (or people in general) talk to each other. There were, for example, “your mamma” jokes, which are about twenty years old, and this was supposed to be contemporary (book published in 2012). There were also these random red herrings – like the popular girl coming to the alternate world with Darcy’s three friends, which seemed like setup of some sort, but it turned out she just happened to be there, with absolutely no purpose to the story at all – which were annoying.

So I give it a middle-of-the-road review. Fun, but forgettable.

Ethan is having dreams about a girl he cannot see, a girl sinking into mud, that he can’t rescue. He doesn’t understand, and he doesn’t expect anything to change in his backwoods small-town Gatlin, South Carolina. But then Lena arrives, the girl from his dreams, and many things begin to change.

I first heard about this book at BEA in 2010, from Bookalicious Pam. She described it as a paranormal southern book, and that didn’t sound in the least bit interesting. I’ve since then heard a lot of people say the book was great, and also that it was very, very southern. Rare is the “southern” book that I can stomach, probably because I’m from the south and really don’t like it here, and so every time I’d thought about reading this one, I’d said never mind. I didn’t even attempt it on audio, because southern books are so often read with a crappy southern accent, like the time I tried to listen to The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Bleagh.

But then, on my first day exploring the Celebrity Summit library, I saw both this book and the first sequel, Beautiful Darkness, on the shelves. I decided to pull both of them off and add to a pile of books-to-possibly-read-on-vacation. I hadn’t brought any books with me, and I knew I wouldn’t read all six books I grabbed from the library, but I also figured I could at least try them and see, once and for all, if the southern part was enough to offset the great part everyone talked about.

Turned out, I really enjoyed the book. It was interesting. First, it had a male narrator, and the paranormal person was the female protag, not the male. That was unusual. Then, it really did capture southern small-town very well, and in a way that was humorous to me, not annoying. So another point for that. Lastly, the plot itself was unusual and interesting, and mostly fairly unpredictable. I enjoyed 90% of the book, and my only qualm with the plotting was the muddled end. I would have preferred a more definite ending, rather than the quagmire that the book fell into (and then kept swimming through for 90% of the second book – review to come later). But overall, the book was well-written and captivating enough for me to move on to the second in the series not long after I finished the first, which is a good thing. I’m glad I finally read this one.

Oh! And I also love that the title doesn’t refer to the Casters, but to regular human beings. I don’t have the book in front of me, since I had to leave it with the ship, but I adored the quote that the title comes from.