Advanced Review: Sapphique

If you haven't read Catherine Fisher's Incarceron stop reading, go to your local bookstore, buy it and give it a read.

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Okay. That was great wasn't it? Didn't you love the world building? The characters? The way Fisher told the two parallel narratives by first alternating chapters and then later as the narratives came closer and closer to intersection began splitting the narrative within chapters? I think the technique makes Incarceron a book one simply can't put down.

Brilliant, mind bending ideas abound in Incarceron. But beyond the perfectly crafted "Era" dystopia, and the living, breathing, ever changing prison, there is a fundamentally sound story of two kids trying to figure out how to best survive the world(s) they live in.

I found Incarceron pretty much a perfect novel. The only weakness I found was that occasionally the descriptions of the action sequences were a little bit unclear. Everything else though, solid gold!

Thanks to Peter Sieruta's Collecting Children's Books blog I knew the Sapphique ARC was out there, so last week when I was in my favorite local independent children's book store, little shop of stories, I looked for the ARC behind the counter. To my pleasant surprise, Sapphique was indeed on the galley shelf. Diane, the owner of Little Shop, was kind enough to loan me said ARC. I imagine the smile on my face leaving the bookstore was ear to ear.

I jumped right into Sapphique and was pleased to see that the action picked up only a few months after the conclusion to Incarceron. Fisher maintains the parallel story telling technique, though now its Attia and Keiro inside the prison alternating with Finn and Claudia outside in the Realm. Fisher also continued opening each chapter with a fragment of a legend or song which serve to build up the presumably vast oral storytelling traditions that exist inside Incarceron. Its amazing how these short lines of prose can serve to build up and reveal the shared imagination of the people inside the prison.

Since the reader is already familiar with both the prison and the realm Sapphique won't blow your mind in the same way Incarceron was able to. The cat's already out of the bag, but now we get to see what it can do. Sapphique is one part quest, and one part court intrigue. Even with Finn's escape at the end of Incarceron Queen Sia is still in command of the realm and has no intention of giving up an ounce of control or protocol. On the inside, the prison is distracted, Attia and Keiro have forged an uneasy alliance and the Warden is somewhere within the prison with an agenda all his own. Again the action plays out in parallel as Jared, Finn and Claudia try to find a way to hold up Finn's promise and get Keiro and Attia out of Incarceron, while Keiro and Attia may have found their own way out.

Sapphique is an outstanding sequel to a perfect book. Completely compelling from first page last. The ending left me entirely satisfied.

Sapphique by Catherine Fisher will be released December 28, 2010 by Dial Books.