Review Detail

Catherine Fisher is at it again with “The Obsidian Mirror,” the first book in a new trilogy that blends science fiction, fantasy, and time travel.

“The Obsidian Mirror” follows Jake, a boarding school student who will do anything to get out of school and confront Oberon Venn, his godfather and mysterious explorer, who Jake thinks killed his father. When I say he’ll do anything to get out of school, I mean anything, including stabbing a student in order to get expelled. Needless to say, that scheme worked, and Jake learns the disappearance of his father is far more complicated than it seems.

What I love about this book is that every character is insane. I’m not using that in a lighthearted, “ha ha” kind of way. I mean that each character is driven mad to some degree by the obsidian mirror, the device that lets the characters travel through time. Jake is starting to go mad with his need to find his father; Venn is definitely crazy, turning into a recluse, with his obsession to find his deceased wife; Sarah, a suspicious stranger, is insane with passion to accomplish a task she was assigned in another time; Janus and Maskelyne, two characters from separate times, are each mad in their search to find the mirror and use it for their own purposes; and Wharton, Jake’s boarding school teacher who has been tasked with delivering the teenager to Venn, is having a hard time wrapping his mind around the fantastical beings and time traveling conundrums he’s been unwillingly thrown into.

Ultimately, this insanity serves a purpose. Fisher tells readers that it’s important to live in the here and now, rather than obsessing over what happened in the past or what could happen in the future. If you’ve made mistakes, realize that you can’t undo them, but you can move forward with life learning from those mistakes and making yourself a better person because of it.

A heads-up as you head into the book: There are going to be parts in the first half of the book where your brain goes “Whaaaaa?” and you think, “Wait, I don’t get it.” It is all going to pay off, I promise! Fisher puts the pieces of this mystery together one by one, and those pieces create one cosmic picture that is definitely worth the wait.