Hourglass - A 2012 Teens' Top Ten Nominee

June 22, 2012

Seventeen-year-old Emerson is crazy. How else can she explain her unfortunate habit of seeing and talking to the dead people who appear to her everywhere? At least she’s out of the mental ward of the hospital and off her meds now. Still, Em knows that she’s a freak and no one besides her brother, Thomas, and his wife, Dru, know the truth. But what is the truth? Only Michael, the deliciously gorgeous, mysterious consultant who Thomas hires from an organization called the Hourglass, seems to know; and what he reveals about time ripples, time manipulation, and time travel will turn Em’s world completely upside down.

Hourglass by Myra McEntire is the start of a tantalizingly, new series with the sequel, Timepiece, in stores this month. The common premise of teens with powers is twisted from the supernatural and paranormal to true science fiction in this novel, as the physics of parallel universes, the fluidity of the dimension of time, wormholes, negative matter, and the Novikov self-consistency principle are all tied in. And speaking of twists, oh man, this book is full of them. McEntire does a superb job of feeding out just enough information at a time to keep readers on the edge of their seats throughout. Add to this a lusciously hot romance that rivals Clary and Jace, Ethan and Lena, and Nora and Patch, and you’ve got truly explosive teen fiction!

Erin’s Bonus Features for Hourglass

Genre: science fiction
Mood: intense
Song: “Time Warp” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Readalikes: City of Bones by Cassandra Clare; Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia & Margaret Stohl
Website: myramcentire.blogspot.com

This blog is part of a series on YALSA’s Teens’ Top Ten 2012 nominees. Voting for TTT starts in August; more information can be found here.

~Erin D.
Parkville Branch