Stormy Seas: Forbidden by Eve Bunting

Get you to bed, now." My uncle turned away from me.

There was to be no good-night embrace as there had always been from my mother, no kiss on the cheek as there had always been from my father. These were their manners and I was not to question.

I started up the stairs. But I had forgotten my cloak that I had draped on the chair when I first entered Raven's Roost. I went down, quietly, to retrieve them.

My uncle was speaking. "Will she be strong enough, Minnie?" he asked. "In body, yes. In her head, I do not know," my aunt answered.

I clutched the banister, afraid to move. Then my aunt said, "Archie sent a message. There's a goodly one on its way. He says it'll be here tomorrow night. Praise that it's not tonight, and her just arrived. We'll have time to make arrangements before it gets here."

"Aye," my uncle agreed. "She's young and strong. She'll be choice."

Nothing feels right about the place by the sea to sixteen-year-old Josie, orphaned by her parents' sudden deaths, and sent from her comfortable home in Glasgow to live until she is eighteen with an uncle and aunt she's never known. The dank, moldering house on the foggy, stormy northwest coast of Scotland is dark and cold, and so are her relatives. Auntie whispers mysteriously to her huge hound, Lamb, and when Josie comes downstairs during the night, Lamb attacks her ankle savagely. Josie can only guess that the whispers were orders to Lamb to keep her in her room until morning. There is something sinister in the conversation she overheard, but when she wakes, her aunt and uncle are gone.

Josie goes outside, limping on her festering foot, and meets up with a strange young man, Eli Stuart, who gives her his coat, saying that he does not feel cold, and who offers his mother's medicinal skills for her wounds. Mrs. Stuart is a kind and skillful herbalist, and after blackberry scones and a cup of tea with the motherly woman and her handsome son, Josie feels better about Raven's Roost. She also feels inexplicably drawn to Eli. But when she ventures to town to replace the stocking Lamb ripped, the storekeeper warns her to stay away from Eli Stuart, saying that everyone believes he is "forbidden."

All of it seems almost beyond belief to Josie. But as her aunt and uncle return, they seem to be preparing for some awaited event. They give Josie men's trousers and boots, and a thick knitted sweater that reaches her knees, with SEA URCHIN stamped on the front, and tell her to wait while they head down to the stormy beach. Other people are gathering and strangely exuberant in the face of the roaring storm coming off the sea, and Josie stealthily creeps down the path to the beach and conceals herself to watch the preparations below.

I held on to the railing so that I would not be hurled away. I saw people, forty or more, massed on the strip of shingle. Far out at sea, the lights of a ship vanished, reappeared, as if the sea sucked the vessel down and then threw it up again. On the cliff's edge, further along the Point, I became aware of another light, bright and friendly, swaying along the edge of the bluff. There was new cheering now on the beach.

I could no longer deceive myself. They were happy. They had hoped the ship would wreck, and now their hopes were realized. They were not there to save, but to pillage.

As she watches the people on the beach strip drowned passengers of clothes and valuables, Josie realizes that their ship was drawn into the rocky reef by the light on shore, thinking it led to a safe harbor, and her uncle and aunt are clearly planning to make her part of their crime. She hastily returns to the house to prepare to flee, to somehow escape those horrors she has seen. Then she hears a voice, calling her name.

A surge of joy came with the sight of him that made me forget my despair. "Oh, Eli, you came for me. I got away. I saw ..."

"You cannot go yet." he said. "When you see the end, you will understand."

Not only is Eve Bunting the author of charming children's picture books, but also an award-winning master of foreboding settings and baleful characters, and in her latest gothic novel, Forbidden (Houghton Mifflin Clarion, 2015), there is one more element in store for her young heroine, a glimpse of the supernatural that overwhelms her senses when she realizes that her mysterious Eli is more than mere mortal. With undertones of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, this story will please devotees of the nineteenth century gothic tale, and young adult readers with a taste for romance and terror, will relish each eerie detail as it unfolds. This is a book worth saving to savor on a dark and stormy night.

Out-of-Body: The Trap by Steven Artnson

The last day of summer break before my seventh grade year was the first time I ever got punched in the face.

"Why are we spending the last day of vacation trying to help Carl?" I complained, wiping sweat from my brow as we four (me and my twin Helen with our best friends Alan and Nicki) pedaled along. Every kid around Farro was anxious about Carl. He was the worst bully in Johnson County and he'd gotten twice as bad this summer. I was terrified of him and plenty nervous about scouting around his secret hideout. But I was willing to, mainly because Carl was Alan's brother, and Alan was my best friend.

There was another reason I was out here today-- Helen's best friend Nicki. I had a crush on her.

Henry is a worrier, and he's right to be afraid of encountering Carl in his hideout. Just as Henry crams the damp books hidden there into his rucksack, Carl appears and gives Henry his first black eye with one mighty punch. Helen jumps on Carl's broad back with a choke hold and in the melee', the four of them manage to escape on their bikes, with Carl bellowing strangely after them:

"I'm going to live forever!"

Carl's words make no sense to Henry, but that night Henry opens his rucksack, and one of the books, Subtle Travel and the Subtle Self by Abe Moller. intrigues him as soon as he reads the first page.

"You think you are one person in one body, but that is a fault of perception. In fact, you are one person in two bodies. Your second body: weightless, massless, flow--the subtle form. Learn: the physical sleeps; the subtle awakes."

The secret to awakening this other self requires repeating a series of numbers, Fibonacci numbers, as Henry learns, while falling asleep. Henry tries it.

Looking down at myself I saw that my arm, which I'd balanced upright, was lying on my chest. My body was sleeping peacefully. I could see the black eye starting up where Carl had punched me.

When Henry follows the book's directions to rise from his sleeping physical self he finds that he sees everything in the dark in a new way. Henry shares the secret with Helen, Alan, and Nicki, and while their physical selves sleep soundly, they set out to discover the link between the mysterious book and the missing Carl.

At first walking the night together as spirit forms in great fun, but soon what the friends discover is more strange and threatening than they could have imagined. The subtle world has its own practitioners and its own system of order, policed by NFTSA, the National Flux Travel Security Association, threatened by its prophet, Abe Moller, whose goal is to find a way to live forever, free from the inevitable death of his physical body. And, as Henry and his friends discover, Carl, the not-too-bright bully of Farro, Iowa, is unfortunately Moller's chosen guinea pig.

Steven Arntson's The Trap (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015) combines his spot-on setting in rural Iowa in 1963 with a sort of hypernatural uber-world, part The Da Vinci Code, part Maxwell Smart's KAOS. Arntson deftly handles the juxtaposition of the very real small town world of  four early adolescents dealing with peers, alcoholic and unemployed parents, and the all-important fall prom date with an amoral but irresistible plane of existence that promises the hope of eternal life. Fans of the supernatural will recognize that the novel's quick conclusion begs for a sequel that reveals more of the rationale behind the author's subtle realm.

"An amazing blend of mystery, romance, science fiction and social commentary," says Kirkus in their starred review.