Songlight

Gr 10 Up–Debut author Buffini drops readers into a fantasy world where everyone has something at stake. Elsa is secretly a telepath, an “unhuman,” and in her country where women are used as property, the men hold power. Unhumans are caged and tortured, and her very existence is at risk. After Elsa experiences a sudden trauma, she discovers the world isn’t quite what her government made it out to be, making her fight for safety more important than ever. Perhaps Elsa isn’t unhuman after all, but the linchpin to a revolution. The story takes place in a dystopian fantasy world similar to ours, though at times it feels more like an alternate reality with imagery of fighter planes in WWII and iron lungs for wasting diseases. The character-driven plot switches among at least five first-person perspectives that provide a well-rounded scope of this world. One drawback is that there are many secondary and tertiary characters that can be hard to keep track of, along with the usual fictional homonym terms that are relevant enough that readers need to remember them in order to understand the plot and world. Once oriented to the world, readers will want more of this fast-paced plot with each page turn.