“What I want to do,” said Juniper, “is an experiment in mental telepathy.” She hesitated, waiting for his reaction. There wasn’t one. “I know I have some telepathic abilities,” she went on more confidently. “I can go through a pack of cards, face down, and guess about fifteen correctly. And I often know who it is when the phone rings before I answer it. But I want to try mental telepathy with someone else. I want to try giving someone else my thoughts. Images are easier to receive than words. They’re more intuitive somehow, not so tied up in logic and reason. I want to see if I can send images to someone else and whether they can draw what they receive. I need someone who’s sensitive and a good artist.”
Dylan’s gaze shifted, and his eyes met hers. “Me, you mean?” he said.
She smiled unexpectedly. “Who else, Leonardo? You’re perfect.”
This is one of those books my mum picked up for no special reason for my sisters and me and it turned out to be really good. Or maybe my sister picked it up for no special reason and it turned out to be really good. Whatever.
It’s about a boy called Dylan (why Dylan? don’t ask me) who is a bit of a geek and a loser but he’s brilliant at art, that lucky duck, and one day this beautiful popular mysterious girl called Juniper (what a good name!) notices he’s good at art and enlists him for her private psychic image-sending project. At first they’re just sending images of things she goes and sees, but after a while it turns out that her ultimate goal was to travel mentally through time and send him images from Back In The Day. The witch-burning day, as it goes. And things get very intense for everyone.
(I find it tricky to cast a critical eye upon books I’ve been fond of for a while.)
I really, really like this book. Juniper is a good name, for one thing, and for another thing, I have always wanted to be able to do psychic things. All my faintly-psychic family members, as well as this book, assure me that this is no desirable thing and in fact can be very annoying for your brain, but still, although I mostly believe them, I am always a teeny bit jealous and wish I were not so completely close-brained. But I think Ms. Jordan does a good job of integrating the supernatural elements of the plot with Dylan and Juniper’s family lives and the effect of their relationship on everyone else. And the supernatural elements are most interesting.
It just occurred to me Sherryl Jordan has probably written other books, and – hey! the library says that indeed, yes she has. Yay. There are six books of hers at my university library, and six at the public library, and I forgot to pay attention to the titles, so I don’t know how much overlap we’re looking at, but anyway, there are definitely at least seven of her books that exist and are available to me and I haven’t read them yet. Oh goody.