“Trance” by Linda Gerber (2010)

It begins as a sub­tle vibra­tion, a tingling.

There is time to take only one breath.

The trance begins.

When it is through, Ash­lyn is cer­tain of two things …

Some­one she knows is about to die, and …

She is pow­er­less to stop it.

Cap­sule Descrip­tion: Ash­lyn has a gift, one that she can’t con­trol, one that she can’t under­stand. If she could have under­stood it, her moth­er might still be alive. As it is, she’s all alone, and her gift is telling her that some­one else is about to die, but who and how is still a mystery.

Descrip­tion: Ash­lyn (and her old­er sis­ter Kyra) have the gift of pre­cog­ni­tion. The gift comes sud­den­ly, gives them inco­her­ent visions and leaves them remem­ber­ing a strange series of num­bers. What is worse, one of those visions, had they been able to decypher it, could have saved their moth­er. Now Kyra is gone, some­place their worka­holic father won’t reveal, and Ash­lyn is left alone, not only hav­ing to deal with the guilt over her moth­er’s death but also in deal­ing with her gift that does­n’t stop occur­ring. Its only by the help of her friend and co-work­er, whose mys­ti­cal knowl­edge helps her fig­ure out the mys­te­ri­ous num­bers and under­stand the iden­ti­ty of the next per­son to die.

Com­men­tary: This book does­n’t exact­ly deal with any form of hyp­no­sis or any­thing relat­ed, but when I saw the image on the cov­er, I knew I just had to put it in the col­lec­tion. Just find­ing it, too was quite the coin­ci­dence: I was at the local con­ven­tion venue, attend­ing a dif­fer­ent event, when I saw there was a room next door where a Scholas­tic Books dis­trib­u­tor had set up. Being the book lover I am, I wan­dered through, and spot­ted the cov­er across the room. After pick­ing it up and read­ing the back cov­er, it was pret­ty obvi­ous that the “trance” of the title was not any­thing exter­nal­ly imposed but some­thing result­ing from the hero­ine’s inter­nal gift.

Rec­om­men­da­tion: For a YA (high school) book, its pret­ty good. The nat­ur­al and super­nat­ur­al prob­lems Ash­lyn is forced to endure are well described and the read­er is led to sym­pa­thize strong­ly with her.

Ref­er­ences:

• Author’s web­site and  blog
• Ama­zon list­ing