In Sarah Fine's SANCTUM, a
young woman goes to hell to retrieve her best friend, and finds the afterlife
is not what she expected at all.
While the author gets major
props for not mining the same old/same old tropes used in so many YA paranormals,
and for injecting a strong dose of reality into the backstory of her
characters, the set up is not nearly as accessible as many of the other
shadowlands/otherworld/afterlife versions of the Orpheus/Eurydice myth.
SANCTUM is a well-written story
by a writer who understands the genre very well and has twisted it around to
make it darker and richer than the familiar aching angsty teen sex fantasy wrapped
around a paranormal core. There's a little of that, along with the instant
attraction that seems to be de obligatory with these books, but heroine Lela
Santos (who could not be MORE out of place in her Rhode Island high school) has
a mission that is more important to her than the relationship she develops with
the hunky alpha male Malachi, one of the "Guards" who polices the
infernal city.
There are some neat little
twists to the conventions and tropes that are so overused in the genre. When Lela
gets a tattoo, it's not a tramp stamp but a picture of her dead friend, and
it's there as a promise and a pledge more than just skin art.
This is basically a quest novel
and in many ways, it's a quantum quest in that just being on the quest changes
Lela. One of the best things about the book is that it quickly leaves the high
school world behind and takes us to a magical/supernatural/horrible place. The
city is visually stunning, but the Judge who presides over it seems a lot like
the Oracle in the MATRIX series, although she's not baking anyone cookies or
smoking a cigarette. (One of the reasons we know that Lela is a tough girl is
that she is smoking a cigarette at the beginning of the book, though she never
does it again.)
We like Lela, who has escaped a
horrible past and who has a very interesting destiny. The book includes a
preview chapter of the next book, and it sounds pretty intriguing. In fact, it
sounds more interesting than SANCTUM. That's one of the problems with reading
the first in a series--there's a LOT of setup.
This is a promising start to a
series, and it will be nice to see where it goes. Right now, it doesn't seem
different enough--at least not to someone who reads A LOT of this kind of
material (the Guards, in particular, seem a lot like the angels in
ANGELFALL)--but Fine is a writer whose work is so enjoyable that readers will stick around to see what happens next.
