Book Review: Infinite Passage
Infinite Passage. U. A. Hall. Amazon Digital Services, November 24, 2013, Kindle Format, 227 pages.
Reviewed by Stephanie Wilson Medlock.
It’s hard to imagine a less likely choice for intergalactic warriors whose mission is to save the world than four high school freshman girls from the Chicago suburbs. But in the tradition of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight, awesome powers and equally awesome responsibilities are mysteriously bestowed on the unsuspecting teens.
Already uneasy about their transition to high school, Raya, Kiara, Willow, and Shari are further disconcerted when each of them begins to experience strange distortions in her perceptions and abilities, along with phone calls from unknown sources announcing that “the time has come.”
Soon they learn that the inter-realm council is reacting to a major threat—the evil inhabitants of Namug are escaping their own desiccated planet and passing through unguarded portals that allow them to land on Earth. Once here, the rogue visitors take over the bodies of individual Earthlings and destroy them. A total takeover is their ultimate goal.
Bypassing Earth’s governments, who are apparently too unreliable to be included among the universe’s governing bodies, the inter-realm council selects Raya and her friends to search out these trespassing monsters, extract them from their unwilling human hosts, and send them back to the distant planet from which they came. Each girl is given a special power to enable her in this fight. Shari can see visions of what is happening in other places, Willow can exercise superhuman strength, Raya can fly and freeze time, and Kiara can become invisible and lend that invisibility to her friends.
At first disbelieving and certainly unwilling, the four girls are drawn into their roles as the “chosen ones” and fearfully begin their mission to dispatch Namugians from the Earth.
The charm of this book, and it is very charming, is that the girls are always trying to balance the fantastical demands placed on them with their daily lives and responsibilities. Their parents constantly want to know where they are. They have to babysit and figure out their algebra homework. The have crushes on boys in class or need to attend athletic tryouts. They get into petty fights with each other and with their siblings. The relationship among the four is so well drawn that the fantasy element in this young adult novel is almost unnecessary. Each of the four girls has enough conflict in her own life to make each of their stories compelling.
But saving the world is the point of this book, so the next important question is how well the author sets up the magical and extraterrestrial world in which she places her characters. Every author who infuses a story with magic has conventions that must be followed consistently for the reader to suspend disbelief and enter into that world. U. A. Hall does a good job of making the impossible believable. She is particularly skillful when whisking her heroines around the globe. The snippets of different countries and the people they encounter are lively and often humorous. Her magical creations are not as inventive as are J. K. Rowling’s in her Harry Potter novels, and Hall’s inter-terrestrial threat does not have the sly power to reveal underlying teenage problems as does Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series. But the threats to the girls feel real, and not everything works out in the end. U. A. Hall serves up loss and sorrow as well as the trippy happiness of four girls coming to grips with their burgeoning powers.
The writing in this novel is uneven. The author’s ability to get inside the mind of a teenage girl is excellent, and the dialogue between friends is faultless. But there are many times when the author stumbles over sentences that resolve themselves awkwardly. This may not be an issue for the intended audience but creates occasional cringing in the adult reader. A final edit from a seasoned manuscript editor could easily resolve these problems.
Overall, Infinite Passage offers an engrossing story about the power of friendship, as well as an entertaining fantasy of four teens ridding the world of monsters, one Namugian at a time.