Keira lives in a small town and hates it. She plans to escape her parents’ arguments, high school banalities and boring small town by parlaying her love of piano playing into a scholarship for Julliard. Keira escapes through her music, but not in the way she expected.
The Gathering Dark is Irvingtonian Christine Johnson’s imaginative take on a high school girl from small town America encountering an alternate universe. Each universe has its own mythology and systems. Usually they are totally separate, but something has happened.
Keira first encounters the Dark Side through a piece of unusual fruit and a floating tattoo on the hunky new clerk at her favorite music store. More and bigger visions follow. At first Keira thinks she’s going crazy. Then she begins to realize that the “hallucinations” have something to do with the clerk. Oh, by the way, she really falls for him. This doesn’t make her life any easier.
The Gathering Dark offers an interesting vision of what the science of the Higgs Boson particle and the discovery of dark matter morphs into in the mind of an imaginative storyteller. The strong narration tells how Keira deals with her world in Sherwin crumbling as the Dark Side also falls apart. The two crumbling worlds cause huge problems for Keira. She must face her fears and adapt to survive.
I particularly enjoyed Johnson’s creation of the Dark Side with its own ethical and legal systems. There’s a certain amount of poignancy when the reader realizes that the problems of the Dark Side stem from the people’s loss of their traditional values and the people’s misguided attempts to solve some problems. Unfortunately, as is so often the case, the attempts to solve the problems created unintended consequences.
Johnson also skillfully weaves music through the story and gives it a starring role.
As a young adult novel, The Gathering Dark is aimed at 13-18 year old girls. Johnson hits this market spot on. However, I enjoyed reading it and would recommend it to adults also. It isn’t Tolstoy, but it doesn’t try to be. It does a great job of providing an interesting and fun read.
Christine Johnson, Mike Mullin, Saundra Mitchell and Mia Castille will have a panel discussion and sign copies of their books on Saturday, March 30 at the Spades Park Library at 1:00 p.m. The library is located at 1801 Nowland Avenue, 275-4510. The panel discussion is part of the Spades Park Mini Book Festival.
