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An Undiscovered Epic

Christian Askounis gives the reader a wonderful tale in The Dream of the Stone that will have you wanting more. It is the story of a young girl whose parents are killed in a plane crash. When her brother comes home, he reveals that he has a secret and it all revolves around the mysterious place he works way out in the desert. Sarah believes that company is more than a strange employer when she finds herself followed, meets a mysterious woman who appears many places, and when her ability to communicate with her brother is disrupted. Who are they? Where are they? Why are they after this stone her brother smuggled to her? With the help of a friend who has some mystery of his own, she finds herself transported to worlds unknown.
I have to say that this was one of the most delightful reads that I have encountered in a long time. It was a combination of C.S. Lewis meets Madeleine L’Engle. I am almost at a loss for words as this cannot fully describe how wonderful this story is. It is deep. If one reads Lewis and L’Engle, he/she will discover that their stories are more than just stories. They have so much depth to them that children who read them cannot possibly grasp all the messages there. Even adults would have to read and ponder the words. I found myself stopping to think of a phrase and what it means to me.
The characters are very interesting. They have you wanting to dive into them more and get to know them better. The plot is relatively fast paced. There were a few places where it slowed down, but it was necessary to get more information that was critical. From there it picked up again and took off on another fantastical ride.
Wonderfully crafted. The world Ms. Askounis brings to the reader is a fantasy world like no other. It is a story of the soul that has you wondering why the author has not done more. I need more of her great talent! The only thing that could make it better aside from another book would be discussion questions at the end as it has so many things that could be talked about. I’ll be telling many people about this book!

Note: This book was provided by a colleague with no expectation of a positive review. ( )

Reviewed by Candace Cunard for TeensReadToo.com

Fourteen-year-old Sarah Lucas lives a wonderful life. In her youth, she traveled all over the world with her photojournalist parents, and now the family has settled down in a beautiful little farm on the East Coast. Sarah has a constant friend in her older brother, Sam, whose genius intelligence earned him his Ph.D. at eighteen and a job doing research for the mysterious Institute based in California. But Sarah's parents begin to worry about Sam's involvement with the Institute. The project he's working on is top secret, and so is much of the information about the Institute that has hired him. They fly to California to convince Sam to leave his job, but their plane crashes during their return flight, resulting in their deaths.

When Sam returns home for the funeral, he shares information about his research with Sarah, telling her about his experiments to develop a kind of "looking glass" that would allow people and things to be transported between different worlds by enlarging wormholes, tiny passages through spacetime. The newly-orphaned Sarah must deal with her grief, but also with her increasing suspicion that her parents were right about the Institute's sinister intentions for Sam's research. With the help of a strange old lady who appears first as a homeless woman, and later as Sarah's Latin teacher, she learns more about the Institute, and prompts Sam into reexamining the people for whom he works. The culmination of these events results in Sarah and Sam being stranded on an alien world that they reached through the powers of Sam's fully-functioning "looking glass."

Along the way, Sarah meets up with other characters, from this world and elsewhere. I especially loved Angel, the half-gypsy stable hand she meets while living with her aunt and uncle in New York City. The richness of Askounis's characterizations adds flavor to the novel, and real human depth to the conflict, which operates on the level of a grand battle between Good and Evil.

To me, it felt like a cross between the novels of Madeline L'Engle, C. S. Lewis, and Diane Duane, and I would recommend it highly to anyone who enjoys those writers. Like the best of those authors, Askounis writes compelling characters into a significant conflict, and does so with descriptive prose that portrays Earth just as dazzlingly as it delineates the alien world of Oneiros where the novel's climactic events occur. ( )

http://books.moonsoar.com/archives/2008/06/12/the-dream-of-the-stone/ ( )