A Corner of White

A Corner of White by Jaclyn Moriarty, 373 pages

In gray and boring Cambridge, England, Madeleine is still adjusting to her new life – living in a tiny attic apartment, eating only beans, listening to her increasingly erratic mother incorrectly answer every question on a game show she obsessively watches on TV. A far cry from the glamorous jet-setting lifestyle she’d known before the two of them ran away from her rich, cool father. Meanwhile, in the town of Bonfire in the fantastical land of Cello, Elliot obsesses over his father’s mysterious disappearance a year earlier – was he abducted by a rampaging Purple, or did he run away with the high school science teacher? A new family moves into his father’s old mechanical repair shop, the crops are still failing (unless the Flower Child can be captured as she appears), and the princesses go on a grand tour of Cello as tension between Loyalists and Hostiles increases. Madeleine and Elliot discover a crack between their worlds and communicate in letters, providing unexpected help to each other as their respective plots begin to spin out of control.

Moriarty expertly dashes back and forth between these two vastly different worlds, spinning a tale both uniquely wondrous in flavor and refreshingly mundane in conflicts. How will Madeleine react to starting to date a boy from her homeschool class? Is Elliot justified in mistreating the newly-arrived Twicklehams? Why won’t Madeleine’s father return her letters? Will the princesses decide to grace the town of Bonfire with their presence? How long can the crack remain undiscovered, and what will be the consequences if it does not? This is an excellent book for teenagers, and thankfully one as yet unconcerned with more epic storytelling (though there are hints that sequels will broaden the scope of the plot, which is unfortunate – it’s refreshing to have a YA fantasy novel deal with small-scale, personal conflicts rather than epic, world-changing events).

A Corner of White does a great job of capturing small, important moments in these teenagers’ lives. It’s definitely worth reading if you like fantasy – it handles the two-separate-worlds setting adroitly and does an impressive job of making the characters’ lives feel rich and lived-in.