Between the Spark and the Burn
“Go forth and find the strange” and so I did as I open Between the Spark and the Burn, the second book of this duet and I found inside, intriguing characters with eccentric stories for which I could not decide whose tale was superior. As the characters were introduced the stories became more sinister and complex, I threw myself into the story, ready for anything and everything. To fully understand the book, you should have read the first one as things take off quit quickly with just a few tidbits of information about what happened in the previous book. Vi wants to find River and Brodie but what she wants to do with them are totally different. Wide-Eyed Theo’s daily radio show gives nightly reports of strange occurrences and “a boy with flames for eyes and hooves instead of feet” has Vi thinking it might be one of the Redding boys. It’s a road trip with Vi’s determination leading the way with River’s brother Neely, Luke and Sunshine bringing up the rear. It’s the adventure of getting there and the way the author put the details into that adventure that I really enjoyed. It’s not a book that jumps around; you are truly on an adventure visiting many different places. Arriving at Inn’s End, the foursome enter silence, eerie silence, the town is dark with black- feathered corpses littering the ground and dangling for all to see. No signs of life except for the lights in the windows. I held my breath, wanting to savor this moment, how intense, what has just happened? Moments like these, reading the words written on the page and capturing the image in my own head occurred quite often as accompanied Vi on her journey. So certain that these reports from Wide-Eyed Theo had something to do with the Redding boys, they listened to the radio quite often, listening to the callers call in with their reports of strange occurrences in their towns. Acting on a whim they would go, hunting down the brothers if it remotely sounded like something they would do using their powers. Although we have the same characters as the first book, I was surprised in the shift between the two books. The first book had romance, a close-knit appeal to it and this book reached out to a broader community and there wasn’t much romance. Vi has many flashbacks to her days with River but times are changing and so is River.
