A blind British teenager embarks on a frightening mission to rescue her father in this artful thriller by the author of Midwinter Blood, the 2014 Michael L. Printz Award winner.
Sixteen-year-old narrator Laureth Peak's absent-minded author father is supposed to be doing research in Switzerland. But when she receives an e-mail from someone in Queens, N.Y., who has found Jack Peak's notebook, she secretly books a flight to New York City for herself and her seven-year-old brother, Benjamin, and sets out to find him. After getting the "Black Book" back, Laureth and Benjamin examine it for clues to their father's whereabouts and scour the boroughs of New York looking for him. Are the notes leading them to their father? Or are his scribblings about the nature of coincidences just a series of red herrings drawing them deeper into the unknown? When a strange man threatens the siblings at knifepoint, Laureth knows that time has run out. If her father doesn't turn up soon, she and Benjamin might not make it out of New York alive. Sedgwick solidly anchors the preposterous-sounding plot through his vivid rendering of Laureth's dark world.
Readers will be so riveted by Laureth's terrifying navigation of cities and airports with only her brother as her guide that they are unlikely to question some of the novel's more far-fetched aspects. But because Jack Peak is writing a book about coincidences, these unlikely synchronicities actually seem fitting. --Jennifer Hubert Swan, middle school librarian and library department chair at Little Red School House & Elisabeth Irwin High School