Review: “Circle Nine” by Anne Heltzel

Title: “Circle Nine”

Author: Anne Heltzel

Genre: YA

Publication Date: September 2011 (expected)

Synopsis: She knows only Sam, a mysterious teenage boy. He is her sole companion; her whole life. She was born, already a teenager, lying outside a burning building in soot-stained clothes, remembering nothing, not even her name. He showed her the necklace she had on, the one that named her: Abby. Sam brought her to live in his cave-palace, where he gives her everything she needs. He loves her. He protects her from the world outside, from everyone who wants to hurt them, like the denizens of Circle Nine, Dante’s deepest circle of hell. But even in a charmed, brand-new life like Abby’s, change will come. Sam falls ill. A new girl comes to stay, and Abby begins to question Sam’s devotion. With doubt comes emotional turmoil, changes in perception, and glimpses of her past identity. In this courageous psychological thriller, Abby tells the story of living her new life and discovering her old one, while grappling with an ever-changing reality.

☆: 4/5: a dream gone horribly wrong, yet wonderfully right to read.

Review: At first I thought that this was going to be some kind of hybrid scifi-fairy tale. I was right on only half of this: the fairy-tale part. A fairy-tale gone horribly wrong, but so beautifully written that it captures you right from the first page.

To say it was a shock to figure out what happened to Abby pre-amnesia is putting it lightly. Or rather, how the amnesia happened – the act itself that helped project her brain into nothingness. The events leading up to the final revelations about Abby’s life in Circle Nine were not so surprising – the signs until Amanda showed up were pretty clear from the start. But the lyrical way that Heltzel writes it, it takes one’s brain a little longer to wrap around the fact that this cave is not a palace, and Sam is really not Abby’s prince but someone just profiting from her situation.

Not that that’s a bad thing – if anything, the roundabout way that Heltzel spins her tale just hits the reader home all the more powerfully in the end. It’s the effect of delay that really brings the horrors of what Abby endures with/under Sam in the abandoned mine/cave. The frenetic yet dreamy pace of events and how quickly things go downhill also adds to this feeling of delay that just suckerpunches the reader in the gut all the harder; Abby’s blind and pure trust and love of Sam combined with the events that send everything spiraling into ‘circle nine’ helped to make, at times, this book very difficult to continue reading, emotionally. It might trigger some readers who have gone through any kind of emotional and/or sexual abuse. It didn’t trigger me (I’ve had the former, not the latter, thankfully), but even so there were some points where I had to bookmark my place on the e-galley and take a day-long break to let everything settle. Doing so made this story all the more meaningful in the end.

Yes, this book is THAT powerful. Handle with care. One of the best of 2011 in the one-off novel category, most definitely.  Not the feel good book of the year, but it’s something that should still be read nonetheless.

Advertisement