DUST
Arthur Slade
Wendy Lamb Books
Science Fiction
ISBN: 0385730047
192 pages

Seven is too young to walk to town by yourself.

The realization hits Robert like the blood egg --- the bad egg, the one that was gray instead of white, the one that was too heavy and rotten and, as a sign of things to come, hits the ground. This was the day Robert's younger brother Matthew got in the truck with a strange man and didn't come back, the day the lines between fantasy and reality, good and evil, childhood and adulthood, begin to blur.

Robert knows there's something strange about Abram Harisch, the visitor who brings luminous butterflies, a magical mirror and the promise of rain to his drought-plagued farming town in Saskatchewan. For weeks, Robert doesn't dream and everyone in town becomes obsessed with building a rain mill, the invention Abram promises will make the dust disappear. Robert is the only one besides his uncle who thinks there's something sinister about Abram, and his discoveries lead to something more twisted than he could ever imagine.

Like Abram Harisch himself, DUST is enticing, bewitchingly elegant and not what it appears to be. It's part fantasy, part science fiction and entirely suspenseful. Fans of Ray Bradbury and Philip Pullman's THE GOLDEN COMPASS will be interested in the ideas behind dust and the way a seemingly magical object can wield power over so many people. This is a complex story told in disarmingly simple prose, one that stays in the imagination long after the reader is finished.

   --- Reviewed by Carlie Kraft

Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.

© Copyright 2003, Teenreads.com. All rights reserved.