The Dickens Mirror

Gr 9 Up—This follow-up to Bick's chilly, multilayered psychological horror novel White Space (Egmont USA, 2014) moves most of the action to a fog-bound and filthy Victorian London insane asylum. With food scarce and time running out, reality is chancy and remade all the time, accidentally and on purpose. The fabric of time and personhood seem to be slowly crumbling, as characters face multiple versions of themselves and their memories, desperately trying to align a multiverse of malevolent fears, dangers, and manipulators. A bold and exciting premise, but in execution this work doesn't hold up, despite a welcome infiltration by none other than a version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, complete with a talking Black Dog tattooed his right bicep. It's difficult to sustain much engagement or sympathy with the characters, especially when many of them are just facets of one another. There are some satisfactory resolutions, but where White Space used frustration and tedium to maintain tension, here the plot is so convoluted that most of the tension drains out.—Katya Schapiro, Brooklyn Public Library