Passenger by Andrew Smith

Jack and Conner thought they had it all figured out. They thought they could fix everything, their addiction to coming to Marbury. But they’re wrong, and everything goes wrong. He and his friends Conner, Ben, and Griffin end up scattered across Marbury, in different places and different times, with no way of finding each other but pure dumb luck. Jack is trying to find his way home, but he keeps getting stuck in Marbury, and Marbury that isn’t really Marbury but is, and a place that looks suspiciously like his home in Glenbrook but can’t be. And what’s worse is that Marbury and all the versions of Marbury and every other world that Jack stumbles into are falling apart. Jack thought he was fixing everything, but he might have just destroyed it all instead.

There are probably many words to describe my feelings and emotional state after finishing reading Passenger, but I’m sure that if you had asked me in that precise moment in time, all that would have come out of my mouth would have been a soundless, meaningless garble. That is what reading Passenger does to you. It takes all your expectations, horrors, and confusion from reading its prequel, The Marbury Lens, muddles them around some more, and presents you with yet another reading experience that, well, just blows your mind. There’s really no way else to describe it. Smith has just created such an incredibly complex and layered story here and with characters so achingly real that readers will be sucked into the horrifically fascinating world of Marbury along with Jack. This is definitely not your typical story about alternate worlds, horror, danger of apocalyptic proportions, or any of that—and that’s why it’s also one that everyone should experience for themselves.

Fans of The Marbury Lens will not want to miss its crazy yet wonderful sequel in Passenger, nor will readers who also enjoyed Darkside by Tom Becker and Bleeding Violet by Dia Reeves.

Rating: 5.0

Review copy from publisher Macmillan