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    White Space
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    White Space
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    White Space
    Ebook556 pages6 hours

    White Space

    By Ilsa J. Bick

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    In the tradition of Memento and Inception comes a thrilling and scary young adult novel about blurred reality where characters in a story find that a deadly and horrifying world exists in the space between the written lines.

    Emma Lindsay has problems: no parents, a crazy guardian, and all those times when she blinks away, dropping into other lives so surreal it's as if the story of her life bleeds into theirs. But one thing Emma has never doubted is that she's real.

    Then she writes "White Space," which turns out to be a dead ringer for part of an unfinished novel by a long-dead writer. In the novel, characters travel between different stories. When Emma blinks, she might be doing the same.

    Before long, she's dropped into the very story she thought she'd written. Emma meets other kids like her. They discover that they may be nothing more than characters written into being for a very specific purpose. What they must uncover is why they've been brought to this place, before someone pens their end.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLerner Publishing
    Release dateJan 1, 2014
    ISBN9781606844205
    Unavailable
    White Space
    Author

    Ilsa J. Bick

    Ilsa J. Bick is an award-winning, bestselling author of short stories, ebooks, and novels. She has written for several long-running science fiction series, including Star Trek, Battletech, and Mechwarrior: Dark Age. Her YA works include the critically acclaimed Draw the Dark, Drowning Instinct, and The Sin-Eater’s Confession. Her first Star Trek novel, Well of Souls, was a 2003 Barnes and Noble bestseller. Her original stories have been featured in anthologies, magazines, and online venues. She lives in Wisconsin with her family. Visit her website at IlsaJBick.com.

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    Reviews for White Space

    3/5

    35 ratings11 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Thanks to Edelweiss and EdgemontUSA for allowing me access to this title.

      I was struggling just a little with the storyline at first, although I was doing ok with it. Then it really bogged down for about 100 pages where I wasn't sure what was happening. Then it picked back up and I was able to get into it a little more. This is definitely one of those "thinking" books where you have to keep track of a lot of characters and twists and turns, so I wouldn't recommend it for those looking for a quick easy read. I'm starting to feel that Bick has a lot to say, and while it makes sense and mostly works sentence-wise and word combination-wise, her books are starting to get a little long and could probably tell the same story in a lot fewer pages.

      Overall it was ok, and I think there are those who will really enjoy the whole story-within-a-story concept and characters jumping from story to story. It just wasn't exactly what I was hoping for.
    • 4/5
      White Space (Dark Passages #1) by Ilsa J. Bick is easily going to be one of the best fantasy/horror novels I will read all year and the year has just begun!Teenage Emma Lindsay has metal plates in her head, no parents and an eccentric catatonic artist for a guardian. But those are Emma's regular problems, her stranger problems come when she blinks away and drops into other lives and other times. Other lives that have Emma wondering which is real and which is not.The Emma writes a story called White Space about a group of kids stranded in a haunted house during a blizzard. A story that mirrors an unfinished work by a long dead writer known as Frank McDermott. "...I don't care Frank. Mom shivers as if she just can't get rid of the really bad dream clinging to her brain, but keeps seeing it happen again and again, no matter where she looks. Do what you have to, but kill them. Kill the book. What do you think you just did, Meredith? You can destroy the manuscript or my notes, but it's still there. Dad presses a fist to his chest. The book's inside. You'd have to kill me..."Frank McDermott's story is about characters who fall out of different books and jump off the page, much as it seems happens to Emma when she blinks. And now, stranded in a blizzard with a group of young strangers, she is wondering if she is doing exactly what Frank McDermott wrote. If her reality has somehow become the story."...Frozen in place, she watches the red slink as it seeps across the road, never spreading, never veering, but creeping up the curb and onto the sidewalk, heading straight for the book. As soon as her blood touches the cover, dragging itself like a moist crimson tongue along the edges, curls of steam rise-and the book...quickens. It's like my blink, when I saw Lizzie's dad-Frank McDermott-at the Dickens Mirror. Except it is a book, not a strange mirror, drinking her blood, greedily sucking and feeding, the pages pulsing and swelling, the covers bulging...and then..."Emma, along with Eric, Casey, Bode, Rima, and a very special little girl, Lizzie must survive the story that is being written around them. A story more real then the world they live in. Their reality is found not in the written words, but in the white space in between them.White Space is imaginative and brilliant. Ilsa J. Bick has come up with a grandiose concept and plotted and scored it well. Characters from various books who end up in one tale, unsure of what their reality is and convinced that they are real people. But the question that truly rise is which reality is true and will they live long enough to find it.Bick often refers to a 2002-2003 movie called Identity with John Cusack and Ray Liotta. The story is about a group of people who end up at a road side hotel ala Bates Motel and begin to be murdered. There is a killer among them but what they don't realize is that they are in fact different pieces of one man's personality with one trying to become the dominant personality by killing the other's off. Pick it up, it is freaking awesome. White Space is very much like that. The lines between what is real and what is not are blurred and bleed freely into one another. In less gifted hands this story would drown in the mire of its own confusion. But Black is too good of a writer to allow that to happen. In her hands it is entertaining and suspenseful. She engages her readers and knows full well that when you write a novel of this size it is a commitment from both the writer and the reader and Ilsa J. Bick holds up her side of the bargain.White Space is the first novel by Bick I have ever read but I will freely admit I was already impressed by this author. I met her last year at the Tucson Book Festival, she was signing her books and greeting her readers, most of them young adult readers; all with her arm in a cast and sling. But she was there. In the Arizona heat, taking time to care for her readers. White Space by Ilsa J Bick is a terrific read!
    • 3/5
      Emma has metal plates in her head, terrible headaches and blackouts due to injuries received as a child. During blackouts, she seems to travel to other places. When she writes a short story for English that turns out to be almost identical to an unpublished story by a famous horror writer all these different places seem to slide into each other.
    • 2/5
      I loved the start of this book. For the first half of the novel I was completely hooked. Bick's writing reminded me very much of early Stephen King (which I love). I kept tell everyone to read this novel!But then, also in the King tradition, I got a bit bored with the story. It just seemed to go on for soooo long. I think for me the pacing was just off a bit.As the first book in a series, there was also no resolution for me as the reader. I was left feeling frustrated rather than anticipating Book 2.So although the main characters were fairly well developed, there were too many loose strings left in this book and the pacing crumbled for me halfway through the story.
    • 4/5
      Is what we are experiencing actual reality? How many different time lines (alternate realities) are there? What does it mean to be crazy and by what definition is on crazy? The ultimate philosophical debate on reality.
    • 2/5
      Difficult to follow but an interesting concept. Would be a challenge to mass market this to teens.
    • 3/5
      This book was weird. In no way is that a bad thing, because this book kept me guessing about what was real--and even about what could be real and if anything was real--right up to the end.

      Troubled Emma has far too many problems. Her guardian had a stroke and is no longer physically or mentally there for her, she's got a head full of metal from surgeries, and she keeps having these weird moments where she thinks she's someone else. Those moments are so real that she believes she's another person, living their life, and it isn't until she comes back to herself, minutes or hours later, that she realizes what's happened.

      On top of all this, she writes a short story, a short story she's then accused of plagiarizing from an unfinished manuscript by a dead writer. But she's never seen that manuscript, she's sure of it. It's in this mood she leaves for a trip and ends up caught in a horrible blizzard.

      Then we meet Lizzie, a young girl whose parents are in danger, and whose father might be the danger. And Eric, Casey, Bode, and Rima, who all end up trapped in the blizzard with Emma, and who are in just as much danger as she is.

      Sounds like, what, a ghost story? Monsters? Haunted house? It's none of these things. It's about storytelling, and drawing the line between stories and reality. It's about wondering if you're the protagonist or a supporting character, and it's about taking charge of your own story.

      This story was surreal and wonderful. I really hope there's more to come.

      (Provided by publisher)
    • 3/5
      I got a copy of this book to review through Edelweiss. Thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for providing this book to review. This was a really strange book. I went back and forth between loving the strangeness and hating it. This is definitely more of a horror than a fantasy. Previously I had read the first two books in Bick’s Ashes series, I loved the first one and hated the second one. I guess for some reason I have kind of a love/hate relationship with Bick’s writing.This book is told from a number of POVs. The main story involves Lizzie who is a young girl whose dad is a writer that can enter an alternate world where horrors dwell called the Dark Passages. He drags the horrors from Dark Passages out into his book to create bestselling horror novels. When Lizzie’s dad loses control a number of other characters are drawn into the story through circumstance. However, things are not as they first seem.The other main character that features in this book is Emma. She is a teenager with a metal plate in her head, she was abused and had her skull crushed as a child. She looses time a lot and then she will regain herself and not know where she was or what she did for vast portions of time. Additional characters in the book are Eric. Eric is an ex-marine with a younger brother named Casey. Eric and Casey are fleeing on a snowmobile because Eric accidentally killed his dad defending Casey from him. He runs into Emma on the road.There is also Rima who has fled a druggie mom and hitched a ride with a guy named Tony. She is trying to flee to Canada and can see ghosts as well as hear thoughts from objects. Lastly there are Bode and Battle, they are both Vietnam vets who think it is the 1960’s.Yep, that’s a lot of people and a lot of bouncing around between POVs. The story is incredibly fractured. The concept is interesting however and at the beginning of the book there is this looming dread that really pulls the reader through the book...you just have to know what strange and horrible thing will happen next.Lots of strange and horrible things do happen in this book. A lot of them are very disturbing and gross...so this is not for the faint of heart. You have been warned.I actually thought the first half of the book was interesting and pretty good. It is in the second half of the book where things start to fall apart. You find out that there are alternate realities and even time travel involved in the story. Lizzie spends pages and pages trying to explain the metaphysics of it all to the other characters. The other characters spends pages and pages trying to explain to each other what they think is happening. This is not done well at all...it is boring and confusing. The reader ends up being just as confused as the characters in the book. I almost stopped reading this book. Bick was just trying too hard to make this too complicated, and she doesn’t do a good job of explaining it well to the reader.I like weird books, but I also like them to be enjoyable to read and this really wasn't. It is definitely disturbing and it seems like it could be an interesting concept, but it just is too ambiguous and not explained all that well. Mostly it just ends up being really long and hard to read.Overall this starts out as an interesting concept and book and is engaging. Halfway through though things fall apart, it gets lengthy, boring, and confusing. I really struggled to finish this one. I would give the first half of the book 4 stars and the second half of the book 2 stars. I wouldn’t really recommend this unless you are a huge fan of the bizarre, then give it a try and see if you can get through it. I won’t be reading any more of this series.
    • 5/5
      Okay, so I need to admit something straight out: I had no idea what was going on for the longest time in this book! From the very first page, I was dropped right into this completely CRAZY world and it took a little time to get used to. But I will say this: even when I was confused and hadn’t really grasped why things were the way they were, I was LOVING this story.This book was like a drug and I couldn’t get enough!There were always unanswered questions that I’d have to root out the answers to. And by root out I mean I’d just keep reading until they were finally answered for me down the road, because Ilsa is some mad genius that created this INCREDIBLE idea of a story. Inception in book-form really is the perfect description. Only instead of dream-worlds there are book-worlds and it all BLEW MY BLEEPING MIND!I really was scared starting the story that I wouldn’t be able to get into it. I was lost in the unfamiliar and unique terms that were thrown out like I should already know what they mean. And when I first met each of the characters they had the story swapping between their points of view and cutting off in the middle of sentences and tense scenes and it KILLED me. BUT the more I read, the more accustomed to that style of writing I became and the more I appreciated–and ultimately LOVED–it.Somehow, even though there is a whole SLEW of characters, they were written in a way that they latched onto me and didn’t let go–I love them ALL! Well, all except Chad . . . I didn’t particularly connect with him. But everyone else? Yeah, by seeing the story through glimpses of Tony, Rima, Casey, Eric, Lizzie, Bode, and Emma’s perspectives? I was EATING IT UP!Another fun note about the story: if you’re squeamish reading about blood and gore, this book is going to test those boundaries. MAN does it get graphic! And you know what? The twisted side of me was absolutely LOVING it, it kept it vivid and gripped my attention tight. The whole entire story was chock-FULL of action–all action, all the time.So. Cool.This story is so dark and has such depth, I can’t get over how intrigued I am by it still. I keep thinking about the story even after I’ve already finished it, going back over scenes in my mind because this book makes you think. If you haven’t read White Space yet, I would undoubtedly recommend that you do!4.5/5 stars;)
    • 4/5
      From hence forth, Fridays will be known as the day when I catch up with reviews I’ve been neglecting the whole week while being fully occupied by dodging puke, wiping up poop and cleaning up smashed banana that has suspiciously found itself on every surface of my house. (I know, you’re thinking, you’re a mom – deal with it – but I, myself, am horrified to find that I suddenly have no “me” time. Not even twenty minutes to write up a review of a book I finished more than a week ago. Shame, shame on me. But, look at it this way, my impressions of the book has had a chance to marinate or ferment in a week's worth of tiny person waste).This is the kind of book that you love reading – one that you read anxiously and eagerly, completely engaged in the world of the novel – and then only after reading the whole thing, do you look back, surprised with the honest realization that you don’t actually necessarily understand what you just read. Of course, I shouldn’t be surprised. This massive YA novel started off by disorienting the reader, throwing them headfirst into the dark, murky world of White Space without a life preserver or translation guide. It is only natural that most readers expect some closure, some answers, after 560 pages, but, by then, you’ve come to realize that natural doesn’t really apply to this book. Of course, this is only the first book of the series, BUT I’ve come to expect at least firm footing, a solid understanding of what happened – what will continue to happen – in the subsequent books in this series. I can honestly say the ending left me unsure of what was real and what was this book’s vision of some type of authorship – either intentional or delusional. (If I’m not making sense, read the book, and then you’ll understand me perfectly. Or at least catch my drift).This book draws a plethora of pop culture, sci-fi/fantasy comparisons, the most prevalent being some cross between Inkheart (which I loved – and understood) and The Matrix (which I haven’t seen in forever but remember somewhat affectionately if not foggily). The author herself repeatedly draws attention to this comparison, but, what’s more, she draws comparisons between this world and that Philip K. Dick and Lovecraft (which I thought was lofty, ambitious and advanced for just another YA alternate universe/future book). Also, strangely enough, there were repeated references to that creepy late nineties/early 2000s movie Identity (which I remember may embarrassingly recall enjoying for its twists and turns amid all the corny, killer-loose-in-a-motel-suspense). Overall, I was impressed by the ways that she deftly blended these genres and pop culture to produce this epic piece of (slightly confusing and always ambiguous) YA. Characters are loose in the dark passages between the White Space, dodging the horror that has been unleashed and manipulated by the Whisper Man, falling inbetween Nows, trying to find their true stories without meeting their end. What is real? What is only a creation, a figment of an troubled author’s mind? Do characters and plots exist independently of their creator, fully-formed things with lives and loves of their own, just waiting to be plucked from the mirror and pulled onto White Space for all to observe? I can’t really go into a full description of the plot, but suffice it to say, prepare to have your perception of the book shift several times before coming to an unresolved ending. Yes, I want more. I may be opening myself up to more uncertainty and frustration but I just can’t resist. Personally, I want to know more about these eight murders that keep echoing through the different Nows. I will have to revisit this book before following through with the second, almost guaranteed. It calls for a second reading. At least I’ll have fun trying to guess what type of resolution – or more likely – what kinds of new questions and complications are raised by the sequel.Oh yeah - thanks NetGalley - you're the cat's pajamas.
    • 4/5
      We meet Emma and her friend as they are driving north into a blizzard in Wisconsin. To all those outside Emma’s head she appears to be an intelligent normal college girl, we however get to see inside. And while Emma wants nothing more than to be normal, she isn’t. Ever since her experience ‘down cellar’ (which she tries to keep locked up and never think about) she has had ‘blinks’ or episodes where she loses time. She comes back to herself, like waking up only she has obviously has not been sleeping. It doesn’t seem to be noticed by her friends and she just tries to live with it the best she can.The reason for the trip North is from a terrible surprise she got in class. She was given an assignment to write a story in the vein of a famous horror author, Frank McDermott. She was more successful than she could have ever imagined. Apparently she tapped the same muse as McDermott, since she wrote a story that was almost word for word the same as one of McDermott’s unfinished and unpublished works. Her Professor called her in on plagiarism and has threatened to expel her.We also meet Lizzie, through Emma’s blinks. Lizzie is a little 5 year old girl, who happens to be much wiser than she appears. We come to see her dad is Frank McDermott and his talent for writing incredible horror stories comes with a little help. Dark help.The story spins around these two characters and they draw others in. Strange things keep happening and stranger explanations are postulated. It has a Lovecraftian feel where everyone seems to have trouble holding on to their sanity.The writing was excellent, the descriptions vivid. The puzzle was intricate, and while the first stage was solved in this book, the ending is meant to pull you back for the next stage. I suspect that people who really enjoy psychological horror will love this one. I don’t particularly like this type of storytelling (not the horror, how the characters reacted to everything plus some other things that might spoil the story) and I couldn’t give it more than 3.5 stars. If it wasn’t for the great writing, it would have been a bit less. It is an emotional roller-coaster and left me wrung out.3.5 stars