June 26, 2023
The day before her 17th birthday, Hylee Williams vanishes from a cookout at her Kansas City home. She emerges nine years in the past in a twisted alternate version of a childhood memory in which her family learned that her older brother had gone missing. When she returns to the present, her parents refuse to acknowledge her sudden disappearance and send her to live with her grandmother in the Missouri suburbs. Hylee uneasily settles into her new school, but she continues to randomly blink out of her contemporary life into that sinister alternate world. With no one to turn to, she struggles to understand what’s happening to her and whether it could be related to her brother’s disappearance. After she vanishes in front of tall, charming, and strangely familiar classmate Eilam Roads, 17, Hylee recruits him into her supernatural investigation. Employing alternating past and present sequences, poetic first-person narration, and moody prose, Lewis (The Undead Truth of Us) builds a tense atmosphere shadowed by secrets unsaid. By deftly exploring the persistent echoes of a traumatic event on one family, Lewis emphasizes the healing power of connection and closure. Hylee and Eilam are Black. Ages 12–up. Agent: Katelyn Detweiler, Jill Grinberg Literary.
June 15, 2023
A high school senior vows to solve her older brother's cold case while warding off the growing darkness of an unseen world. Seventeen-year-old Hylee Williams never wanted to leave Kansas. But after she literally vanished and reappeared in front of her parents and best friend during a cookout, Hylee was sent to live with her paternal grandmother in the cookie-cutter suburbs of Missouri. Hylee's new life is less than desirable. She's the new kid at school, her parents barely keep in touch--and she's being pulled into another dimension, always arriving at a sinister version of her childhood home, where she's forced to relive the night when her then-15-year-old brother, Bubba, went missing. Bubba's body was never found, but nine years later, Hylee believes he is still alive. When Hylee meets a charmingly awkward boy called Eilam Roads at a house party, the attraction is undeniable; both feel as though they've met--and loved--each other before. As the frequency and duration of Hylee's time-traveling episodes increase, she leans on Eilam to help control her ability, which may be linked to Bubba's disappearance. Lewis' genre-bending second novel offers equal parts star-crossed romance and spine-tingling science fiction horror. The method for time traveling is too easily explained, but the narrative is richly layered, and Hylee and Eilam's relationship is depicted with tenderness. Main characters are Black. An ultimately hopeful story that shows love--in all its powerful forms--can conquer the demons of the past. (Horror. 13-18)
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August 1, 2023
Grades 8-12 Seventeen-year-old Hylee is no stranger to disappearances: one awful night, her childhood home was destroyed and her brother disappeared and has never been found. But when Hylee quite literally disappears right in front of her parents, they decide it's too much to handle and send her to live with her grandmother, who also doesn't seem to want to talk about what happened to Hylee or her brother. Hylee finally gets a chance to have her questions answered when she disappears in front of gorgeous, understanding Eilam, whose family conveniently happens to contain time travelers. But as Hylee begins to follow the story of what she's seeing when she travels back to that fateful night, the darkness starts to follow her back, and only she can save herself. Though a self-admitted frequent liar, Hylee is a sympathetic main character, with big, believable feelings and legitimate frustrations. Despite uneven pacing and a too-quick ending, differences in ways of handling intergenerational trauma and the importance of familial support and open communication are smoothly interwoven with truly disturbing horror imagery.
COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
November 24, 2023
Gr 10 Up-Lewis's sophomore novel at its premise sounds intriguing and scary, but unfortunately the book is not executed as expected. Seventeen-year-old Hylee moves in with her grandmother after she has an incident at her house where she disappeared from inside her house and showed up again on the porch. When she moves in with her grandmother, she starts to learn that when she disappears, she appears to be going back in time, to when her brother disappeared. There is a lot happening in this book. Hylee is dealing with her mysterious disappearing, her parents not wanting her in their home because of it, her meeting new kids at school, her old best friend ignoring her for disappearing, her romance with a boy she met at at party, the disappearance of her brother after her family home was broken into when she was young, and a creepy no-eyed version of her in the "other world" she goes to. Reading this novel often feels like there are multiple stories happening, but nothing ties together cohesively. Also, for a book pitched as horror, it is more sci-fi/time travel. VERDICT Give to fans of Lewis's first novel or those looking for a different twist on time travel.-Tegan Beese
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