Journey Between Worlds
Sylvia Louise EngdahlYoung Adult
Available from Firebird, an imprint of Penguin
ISBN: 014240828X
May 2006
| In the not-too-distant future, humanity has colonized the Moon and Mars, and travel there is possible though expensive. Earthbound students attend local residential schools which are a type of boarding school. Melinda Ashley is a resident of Oregon and attends a residential school quite near Portland. Her ancestress, the first Melinda, was a pioneer who crossed the country from the East Coast to the Pacific Northwest in covered wagon and has bequeathed her legacy of adventurousness to the family, in particular to Melinda’s mother, who died when Melinda was only a child. Melinda herself plans to graduate from school, attend the University of Oregon for her freshman year, then marry her boyfriend Ross and support him through university and law school. She hopes to stay at her grandmother’s beach home and let Ross commute.
Life has other plans for Melinda, however. Her father is a highly-paid engineering executive and she hasn’t spent much time with him. He asks her to spend the summer after graduation in his company. She hopes for Europe and is astounded and alarmed when he presents her with a ticket to Mars. He is shipping out to Mars to study the potential for his company to open a Colonial office on the planet, and since he is a widower, the ticket that would have been her mother’s can now be used by Melinda. She can’t believe it when he tells her that emigration to Mars had been a dream of her mother and father. Nor does she know what to think or do when Ross decides to pick a fight over this and orders her not to go. Off to Mars it will be, with Melinda dragging her feet all the way. And life isn’t through dealing out surprises for this somewhat sheltered young lady. Journey Between Worlds put me in mind of the young adult novels of Madeleine L’Engle. Although rich in detail about the futuristic Earth and the colonization of Mars, I found the story to focus on Melinda’s coming of age as she develops both emotional and mental maturity. Life seems to deal her one surprise after another as she learns to pick her way through the minefield of reality and begin to make choices as to what will work in her life and what won’t. Sylvia Louise Engdahl skillfully suspends the reader’s potential disbelief and provides sufficient descriptive setting to make this world believable, possible, and wonderful.
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Reviewer: Annie |
