Emily Taylor shares her vivid imagination for magical worlds in her recent young adult novel, The Otherwhere Post. Taylor tells the tale of Maeve Abenthy who has lived for the past seven years with the knowledge that she has a murderer’s blood running through her veins. Believing her father unleashed the Aldervine in Inverly, separating families and causing the deaths of many innocent people, Maeve feels cursed, so she hides behind aliases. Despite his abhorrent legacy, Maeve, a lover of the written word, has always found fascination in her father’s work with scriptomancy, “the art of enchanting any piece of existing handwriting” (8).
When she receives a letter suggesting her father is innocent, Maeve has a mystery to solve. In order to verify his innocence and clear his name, she needs insider information. To gain access to the Otherwhere Post and its secrets, Maeve steals the identity of Eilidh Hill. Once on the campus of the College of Scritptomantic Arts, she becomes an apprentice to Tristan Byrne, a gifted scriptomancer who has secrets of his own. While Maeve attends classes in the art of scriptomancy—the dangerous magic that allows couriers to enchant letters and deliver them to other worlds–she grows impatient for answers. With that impatience, she gets careless.
Over time, the pair develops a complicated relationship. As Maeve sleuths, Tristan soon discovers not only her imposter status but her risky behavior. Likewise, Maeve notices various incongruities in Tristan’s behavior. As the two come to trust one another in a world that seems untrustworthy, they also learn not to form firm opinions of people before collecting facts and spending considerable time learning backstories. Because both are threatened by overwhelming feelings of guilt, they form an unbreakable bond–one that might end in their very deaths.
Readers will likely find this layered mystery with threads of romance an intriguing one since it leaves the individual guessing until the book’s conclusion.
- Donna