The Shimmers in the Night

by Lydia Millet

Overview

Cara's mother is still missing. When her brother Jax texts her from "smart kid's boot camp" in Boston, Cara and her two best friends go to the rescue. But the camp is a front for Cara's mother's organization who are fighting against a force who wants to make the planet over in its own image, which will leave no space for anything else, animal, insect, or human.

A Junior Library Guild Selection.

Lydia Millet is the author of Love in Infant Monkeys and Ghost Lights. She works at an endangered-species protection group. The Shimmers in the Night is the second book in the Dissenters series.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781931520782
Publisher:	Small Beer Press
Publication date:	09/25/2012
Series:	The Dissenters Series
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	7.40(w) x 5.70(h) x 1.00(d)
Lexile:	810L (what's this?)
Age Range:	9 - 12 Years

About the Author

Lydia Millet: Lydia Millet is the author of many novels for adult readers, including My Happy Life, which won the PEN-USA Award for Fiction in 2003, and Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, about the scientists who designed the first atomic bomb, which was shortlisted for the UK’s Arthur C. Clarke Prize. She has taught at Columbia Universityand the University of Arizona and now works as a writer and editor at an endangered-species protection group called the Center for Biological Diversity.

Editorial Reviews

The seemingly three-tiered conflict that emerged in Fires Beneath the Sea (2011) coalesces into a single war in this earnest but somewhat haphazard middle volume. Cara and her brothers (though not their oblivious dad) know their mom's involved in a confrontation that connects murderous mythical creatures with global warming. Cara leaves Cape Cod for a Boston swim meet, but a frightened text from Jax (a classic genius-younger-brother archetype--think Charles Wallace from A Wrinkle in Time) says he's endangered at his Cambridge genius-kid camp. She sneaks off to fetch him, and a man with flames inside his mouth accosts her on the subway. He's a Burner, an elemental who belongs to the army of the Cold. The Cold steals people's consciousnesses (including Jax's) and uses their bodies as "hollows" to serve his Carbon War, which is acidifying oceans and extinguishing species. On the good side are mindtalking/mindreading teachers, Cara's mother (a shapeshifter) and animals both modern and ancient. Relevance to real-world burning of coal and other fossil fuels is vast. However, characters' naiveté and ill-fitting metaphysics (for example, a book that can take Cara anywhere she asks) replace the luminous prose and luscious, cohesive mysteries of the earlier book. Textual insistence on (Arthur C.) Clarke's Law--that magic and technology are indistinguishable--jams the nightmare-image Burners and other fantasy elements into the category of "tech." Nicely serious eco-fantasy; may volume three have more cohesive internal logic. (Fantasy. 9-13)

Kirkus Reviews