Obsidian Mirror

Author: Catherine Fisher
Goodreads Rating: 3.65
Pages: 384
Format: ARC from NYCC12

Jake's father disappears while working on mysterious experiments with the obsessive, reclusive Oberon Venn. Jake is convinced Venn has murdered him. But the truth he finds at the snow-bound Wintercombe Abbey is far stranger ... The experiments concerned a black mirror, which is a portal to both the past and the future. Venn is not alone in wanting to use its powers. Strangers begin gathering in and around Venn's estate: Sarah - a runaway, who appears out of nowhere and is clearly not what she says, Maskelyne - who claims the mirror was stolen from him in some past century. There are others, a product of the mirror's power to twist time. And a tribe of elemental beings surround this isolated estate, fey, cold, untrustworthy, and filled with hate for humans. But of them all, Jake is hell-bent on using the mirror to get to the truth. Whatever the cost, he must learn what really happened to his father.

This book was sadly a victim of my apathy. I was looking for a book that would wow me and draw me into it, but instead I found that I didn’t care about finishing the book through the entire thing and I don’t think that was any fault of the book, but rather my own exhaustion taking a toll on me reading. It reminded me a lot of the Alex Rider books where there is this book who is hell bent on some kind of retribution for wrongs done to his family. It had this reckless kid feel to it where you see the importance of family and that was really great.

I enjoyed the quirks of the book like the fact that Jake had a monkey that he stole and that he was this super determined kid. I felt badly for him that everything in his life seemed to be in the garbage having lost his father and his mother seems to have abandoned him. At the same time though, I felt like I didn’t get to know much about him because it was told from the 3^rd person, and who the book was talking about jumped around between our main characters, Sarah, Venn, Piers, Wharton, Gabriel and Jake. While it was great getting a look at everyone in the book, it irritated that Fischer wouldn’t finish a scene, instead she would leave it with a cliff hanger and then switch to someone else and go back and forth like that quite a bit.

I also felt that there were too many elements that went into this book. There were fairies and time travel and monkeys and it all got very confusing. I think that you need to go into this book expecting things to be a little strange because I went in not knowing what to expect, and I felt sort of thrown for a loop. This book would be great for fans of Percy Jackson and Alex Rider, so if you know people that love them, they should check this out.

The Courts Decision: