ARC Review: White Space

White Space by Ilsa J. Bick
Published by Egmont USA
Format Reviewed: eARC
Publication Date: February 11th, 2014
Genre: I'm not sure...
Pages: 560
Reviewed by: Stephanie
My Rating: 2 of 5 Stars
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In the tradition of Memento and Inception comes a thrilling and scary young adult novel about blurred reality where characters in a story find that a deadly and horrifying world exists in the space between the written lines.

Seventeen-year-old Emma Lindsay has problems: a head full of metal, no parents, a crazy artist for a guardian whom a stroke has turned into a vegetable, and all those times when she blinks away, dropping into other lives so ghostly and surreal it's as if the story of her life bleeds into theirs. But one thing Emma has never doubted is that she's real.

Then she writes "White Space," a story about these kids stranded in a spooky house during a blizzard.

Unfortunately, "White Space" turns out to be a dead ringer for part of an unfinished novel by a long-dead writer. The manuscript, which she's never seen, is a loopy Matrix meets Inkheart story in which characters fall out of different books and jump off the page. Thing is, when Emma blinks, she might be doing the same and, before long, she's dropped into the very story she thought she'd written. Trapped in a weird, snow-choked valley, Emma meets other kids with dark secrets and strange abilities: Eric, Casey, Bode, Rima, and a very special little girl, Lizzie. What they discover is that they--and Emma--may be nothing more than characters written into being from an alternative universe for a very specific purpose.

Now what they must uncover is why they've been brought to this place--a world between the lines where parallel realities are created and destroyed and nightmares are written--before someone pens their end.

I received this book from the publisher via Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review. No compensation was given or taken to alter this review.

 

First of all, I would like you all to bear in mind that I only made it 50 pages into this one. I would also like you to remember that I didn't DNF it because it was horrible or because there was something completely awful about it.

 

I DNF'd it because I was so freakin' confused. This one just isn't for me.

 

From the moment the novel began, I felt as if I had been plopped in the middle of a story where all of the characters kept using weird terms and refused to explain anything. I understood what was going on but I didn't all at once.

 

Honestly, if I could force myself to power-through the confusion, I'm pretty positive I would really like White Space. But I just can't. I didn't have the will-power to keep going.

 

I don't even want to think about how long it took the author to create this effect or how long it took to build this novel. I feel like this was all deliberate. I don't even know. I mean, what I read was well-written.

 

Emma was confused and things were fragmented for her. Therefore, I felt like things were fragmented and I was even more confused than Emma. I feel like the confusion would have been cut down a bit if Emma had told us what she did know, but she didn't always do that. But Miss Bick did a good job putting me in Emma's shoes.

 

The concept is interesting and things are pretty creepy just from what I read. I just couldn't do it. I just wasn't strong enough. I wish I was.

 

I strongly advise you read this review from Nikki @ Fiction Freak because it captures my feelings perfectly, even though she DID get further than I did.