Review: Girl on a Wire by Gwenda Bond

First, thanks to Amazon Children's Publishing and Netgalley for allowing me to read an e-galley of this title.  The book actually was published at the beginning of October, but I did get an e-galley of it right after that I believe.  I was very interested in it for several reasons. First, I really enjoyed the other book that I had read by this author, Blackwood.  Second, there was a time when I was younger that I really wanted to be trapeze artist, so a story about a girl who was a high wire walker in a circus was definitely interesting sounding.  And of course, with American Horror Story being set in a kind of circus/freak show this season, it has really been something that is on my mind lately.  And can I say, that I enjoyed this book a lot!!  It was a really great story I thought.

The main character is Jules.  She is 16 years old and her family has always been a part of a circus, but kind of in a small setting on their own.  She and her father are wire walkers, while her mother does tricks with horses.  The reason they have worked on smaller shows is because of an old feud between their family and the Flying Garcias.  This feud dates back to the time when Jules' grandmother, who she calls Nan, was a circus performer in the same show as the Garcias.  There is a new "big" show called the Cirque American that has asked her family to join.  But because the Garcias are a big part of the show, her father tells the man in charge, Thurston, no.  Jules decides that's ridiculous, and she wants to be a part of something bigger than the show that they will probably not be able to keep going much longer.  And so she sets up an ultimatum by running away and demanding her father make a deal and take their family to the circus. 

When they get there, they get a cold reception from all the other performers.  You see, Jules' grandmother was blamed for several accidents that happened back then, to the point where she was chased out of the show.  Upon arriving, Jules goes exploring, and wanders into a tent where she sees a cute boy practicing on the trapeze.  And then she realizes that this boy is one of the Garcias, so she leaves quickly.  At the big welcome party the owner throws from them, this boy is the first to ask Jules to dance.  And she finds that he may not be as bad as the rest.  That he may be willing to give her and her family a chance.  His sister also seems to be intrigued by Jules' cousin Sam.  But it is their brother Novio that picks a fight with Sam that first night.  And when they get home after the fight, it seems their trailer has been ransacked.  Soon other things keep happening, symbols of bad luck appear as Jules is doing her act, almost causing accidents.  Remy, the first Garcia she met, has found a board, what would be called a murder board on a detective show.  And on it there are pictures of the items that seem to be showing up causing the bad luck.  And there are lots of clues. 

I won't say who, but one character that you will love will have a disaster happen during one of their acts because of these bad luck tokens.  And now Jules and Remy really must figure out who is behind this before anyone else gets hurt.  But they must also figure out if there can truly be feelings between them when they come from families with such bad blood between them.  They are basically a Romeo and Juliet story, down to their names even.

I loved this story. I feel like the love wasn't insta-love, but there was the instant attraction, and that's okay.  I think the relationships between the people in the story were portrayed pretty realistically.  I love all the stuff about the circus that was in the story.  And the disaster I mentioned?  Well, if I hadn't been at work on break when I read that part, I would have been in tears.  Instead I had to hold them in and go back to work, still wondering who was behind the sabotage, and how in the world Remy and Jules would solve the mystery.  Not to mention, what magic might her grandmother have.  And was it really all Nan's fault what happened in the past, with Remy's grandfather.

Another great story from Gwenda Bond.  Now I must get ahold of The Woken Gods soon, because I'm sure I'll love it as well.  Also she has another book coming out next year that will be one of my WOW posts coming up in the next few weeks.

Review: Earth and Sky by Megan Crewe

First thanks to Netgalley and Amazon Children's Publishing for allowing me to read an e-galley of this.  I've been a fan of Megan Crewe since I read the first book in The Fallen World trilogy, The Way We Fall.  I'm behind in that series, still need to read the last one.  But I was excited to see this one come up on Netgalley for request, and so I requested it right away.

All in all, this was an interesting book.  It had a mix of science fiction with the aliens, and time travel which of course included some historical fiction bits.  The main character is a girl named Skylar.  And there is a line one of her friends says at the beginning that I thought would have made a cute change to the title. They were trying to get her attention and they said "Earth to Sky."  But it is Earth and Sky.  Which is still kind of a cool title with her name being Skylar, Sky for short.  Skylar gets these feelings that things are "wrong" and these feelings give her panic attacks a lot of times.  She usually is able to calm herself down by counting.  Starting with beads on a bracelet, where she counts by threes, or should I say multiplies by threes.  The multiplying is pretty good, and reminds me of something that kids with autism or Asperger's syndrome might do.  Other than that she lives a mostly normal life.  One day on a field trip with her class to the courthouse, she starts feeling all kinds of things might be wrong.  And she sees this strange guy, who looks about her age, but something is out of place about him.  He seems more real, more there, than everything else.  And at one point, Skylar's feelings of wrongness give her a vision of an explosion, a bomb of some sort, going off in the courthouse where she and her friends and classmates are.  She plays the vision off as seeing a spider.  But when it happens, the strange boy has shown up again, and he notices that she's noticed something. 

The next day he's outside her school.  And she's afraid maybe he is planning a bomb there or something, as she keeps getting the feelings that normally aren't so close together.  So she goes up to him.  She soon finds out that his name is Win, and he tells her that he is on Earth on a mission to save it from his own people.  It seems they've been studying our Earth for years, and every time they come down and change something, it is what creates the feelings of wrongness for Skylar.  He is able to use her feelings to help him on his mission.  But they are not going to be able to just travel in time to find the things needed with no problems, because there are other people from Win's planet, called Enforcers, that are trying to stop Win and his group. They don't want to leave the Earth alone.  So Sky and Win must travel to different points in time, use Sky's feelings of "wrongness" to figure out where Win's leader left the things they need, and then get onto the next location without being caught by the Enforcers, and without messing up the history anymore.  But Win may not be quite the way he seems, he still has secrets that he hasn't told Skylar.  And Skylar thinks that maybe she could go back and time and find out where her brother Noam disappeared to when she was 5 years old, not caring what that might do to history, and even though it might mean she never develops the feelings of wrongness that lead to her being able to time travel with Win.  The book ends not with a cliffhanger per se, but definitely with questions left unanswered.  I think it is supposed to be a trilogy, so I will be looking forward to the next title to see where it goes next in the mission to save our planet.

I liked the talks about how you couldn't run into your self in the past.  The "dox" which would send you flying through the air if you got to close to something/someone you couldn't be near in that time period.  While the stuff about the alien race was very interesting, I'm not sure I like one point that the author brings up about fossils of ancient humans being "faked" by the aliens.  It's obviously not a religious point of view for the book, nothing against evolution at all really.  I can just see some people maybe seeing it that way. 

An interesting look at time travel in a fun way to deal with saving our planet from a race of aliens who have destroyed their own planet, and look to not really care what they are doing to us.