Glowing deceptions

In Carrie Anne Noble’s Trowbridge and Fye (Oliver-Heber Books, 404 pp.), it’s 1987 and Frances Fye is more than a little obsessed with fairy tales. Her life turns upside down when a mysterious stranger from a wrong-numbered phone call and a new boy at school both start pursuing her. The stranger, who calls himself Trowbridge, begins to call regularly and read her old fairy tales. Meanwhile, the boy at school looks exactly like her fictional crush, Flanagan Foxhand. Yet things are not what they seem.

When Trowbridge turns out to be a bridge troll plotting to take her into the land of Fairie, Frances is quick to jump at the chance to escape her dull life by experiencing a fairy story of her own. But what awaits her in Fairie is not what she anticipated. Instead of the adventure she’d longed for, Fran is turned over to an evil fae princess who’s been searching for her for reasons darker than even Trowbridge could have imagined. Betrayed, imprisoned, and running out of ideas, Fran teams up with her English teacher, the school’s rebel, and a recently dumped boyfriend to escape a world that has no intention of letting her go.

Trowbridge and Fye deals with themes of reconciliation, finding contentment and courage, and learning when it’s wise to end a potentially harmful relationship. Noble has a way of taking known fairy-tale elements and creating unique plots and characters. This nostalgic tale is refreshing in that it is entirely unpredictable and offers teen readers wisdom on trust and dating rather than a standard fairy-tale ending.

In All That Glows by Lauren Smyth (Enclave Escape, 336 pp.), Kyrie has spent most of her life surrounded by a chain-link fence. She’s never questioned whether the viral rain that killed off most of the population was real or if the fence was there for anything other than protecting her small town from the effects of the virus. She never had a reason to question the history of the town and its survivors until the day a stranger in a gas mask showed up on the other side of the fence with wild stories of a world that should no longer exist. Yet Kyrie doesn’t know if she can trust Thatch even though she desperately wants to believe his stories.

When her best friend disappears, Kyrie is willing to start asking questions and doing everything in her power to leave the boundaries of the fence—even if that means putting her life in the hands of someone who is probably lying to her. Yet the price to discover the truth behind the virus, and to learn her enemy’s long-held secrets, may be more than she and her friends are able to pay.

All That Glows is a fast-paced young adult dystopian novel with a cast of complex and unique characters. Smyth, who is WORLD’s first Belz Fellow, uses the plot to explore themes of found family, unconditional love in the midst of a difficult mental illness, and how to work through doubting God’s goodness.