Passenger

Starred review from October 1, 2012
Although 16-year-old Jack and his friends survived their visit to the hellish alternate world of Marbury in Smith’s superb The Marbury Lens, the boys were both badly scarred by the experience and strangely addicted to it. Trying to destroy the lens, they instead discover that there are an infinite number of such universes, each more horrific than the last. In order to expiate the crippling guilt Jack feels over bringing his friends to Marbury, he must find a way to keep them alive and bring everyone home. Smith is a brilliant, almost hallucinatory stylist, who frequently uses his talent to gruesome effect: “The bandages and tape... soaked through with blood and pus that separated like light in a prism as the fluids migrated through the gauze and formed layers of color—the broken-down spectrum of the stuff inside of Jack.” And after all the torment Jack suffers, Smith pulls out an ending that, while perhaps not “happy” (this is Marbury, after all), feels both right and true. Readers who were riveted by The Marbury Lens will flock to this story. Ages 14–up. Agent: Laura Rennert, Andrea Brown Literary Agency.

Starred review from September 1, 2012
The menacing, post-apocalyptic world of Marbury is again richly imagined in this stunning sequel to The Marbury Lens (2010). Four boys at the heart of the first novel return for another harrowing journey. Jack, whose abduction and near-rape was the catalyst that brought about his descent into Marbury, his best friend, Conner, and Ben and Griffin, two boys they first encountered in the alternate world, begin by attempting to destroy the lens that clutches Jack in its grip, compelling him to return repeatedly to the horrific world of cannibals, monsters and death. When they smash it, they inadvertently create a schism between dimensions--their hometown of Glenbrook becomes a terrifying mirror of Marbury with many variations in between--making escape nearly impossible. As in the first, readers will not be sure what is real, what is nightmare, what may be metaphor. Smith has created a fantastically effective, sinister setting and imbued it with characters that are loyal and decent, even at their most desperate. Unrelentingly harsh in tone and language ("Fuck this...I'll show you who he is. We'll fucking go kill him. I'll bring back his fucking head"), this will be devoured by fans of the first, despite the fact that it offers few clear answers, right to the surprisingly gentle and wise conclusion. Brilliant and remarkably unsettling. (Horror/fantasy. 16 & up)

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October 1, 2012

Gr 9 Up-Readers will need to be familiar with The Marbury Lens (Feiwel & Friends, 2010) to fully appreciate Passenger. When Jack and his friend Connor leave to spend their junior year at a boarding school in England, they decide to cleave the Marbury lens in two, leaving one half with their younger friends Ben and Griffin in California. They meant to make things right, not to destroy them. Alas, by shattering the lens, they find that their out-of-control visits to Marbury become blacker, bleaker, and more foul than ever before. The "not-world" of Marbury is clearly related to their everyday hometown, populated by some of the same people, but suffering the aftermath of war and plague. People can be dead in one reality, but alive in another. Friends can become enemies. Violence is the normal state, and skulls and severed body parts serve as decorations and jewelry. Jack narrates, but he often refers to himself in the third person, as if viewing events as an outsider. He likens Marbury to nesting dolls-worlds within worlds-and all of the Marbury levels are gruesome and horrifying. Every so often, Jack surfaces in the "real" world, just long enough to vomit and realize that he needs to go back to Marbury, to try to rescue Ben and Griffin, and find Connor, who is sometimes with the enemy forces, and other times a friend. This book is for readers strong of stomach, willing to walk with Jack and Connor to the edge of sanity. Their willingness to suffer for each other, and to try to see to the safe return of Ben and Griffin, are small rays of hope in a book otherwise as dark as they come.-Maggie Knapp, Trinity Valley School, Fort Worth, TX

Copyright 2012 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 1, 2012
Grades 10-1 *Starred Review* Things got mighty grim for Jack in The Marbury Lens (2010), but it seems that being abducted by a sexual predator and then sucked through a set of glasses, in and out of the ruined wasteland of Marbury, was just the first circle of hell. Jack decides, along with friends Conner, Ben, and Griffin, to destroy the glasses, but smashing the lens only results in fracturing the boundaries between worlds and shuttling Jack and crew through progressively more tortured realities, where savage creatures hunt down boys and disfigured corpses outpopulate the living. The first book's emotionally eviscerating gut-punch came mostly from Jack's tormented wavering between the real world and Marbury. This follow-up becomes almost completely unmoored from reality's anchor, an experimentally crazy tour through a junk-sick fever dream fueled by Jack's anguish, guilt, anger, grief, and self-loathing. The drawn-out, hellish trip is told in frantic, convulsive prose that festers around the nauseating horrors Jack witnesses in Marbury and the traumatic psychological wounds he can't stop prying open. Where it all leads to both surprises and recalibrates what the whole trip has been about. Or not. Smith is hardly afraid to leave things open-ended, unspoken, and all the more memorable for it. With this uncompromising two-book saga, Smith has securely carved out his spot on the darkest fringes of YA lit.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)