Flux

by Beth Goobie

Overview

Several years earlier Nellie and her mother fled the Interior and its hated security police for the Outbacks, a loose-knit resistance of small cities, towns and rural areas. Since then her mother has disappeared and twelve-year-old Nellie is on her own, scrounging a living where she can find it. When loneliness opens her mind to flux, the ability to alter her vibratory state in the molecular field, she learns to travel to other levels of reality. When a prank by the Skulls, an unruly gang of boys, reveals several large scars on her scalp, Nellie is forced to confront the terrifying truth that her vague memories of experiments that took place while she lived in the Interior are real. Befriended by fourteen-year-old Deller, leader of the Skulls, Nellie learns of the disappearance of his younger brother Fen. Using her ability to travel the levels, she eventually finds Fen trapped in an experimental laboratory deep in another reality. Although Nellie is unable to free him, her discovery precipitates a series of events that lead her and Deller back to the Interior, and straight into the memories she has been trying so hard to forget.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781554696222
Publisher:	Orca Book Publishers
Publication date:	04/01/2004
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	276
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	12 - 17 Years

About the Author

"Beth Goobie is an award-winning author of a number of books for teens. Her book, Before Wings, won the CLA YA Book Award, was a Governor General's Award nominee, an ALA Best Book nominee and a Teen Top Ten."

Read an Excerpt

Crouched and grinning, he faced her. Fourteen, wiry and strong, he was tuned to every pulse of his body. Violence sang in his blood, sky met earth and he was a lone dark figure dancing at the center point. At the base of the fence the dog went manic, vaulting itself upward, spiraling into a high-pitched whine. Leaning down, Deller teased it with a dangling hand.



"Gotcha, Bunny," he sneered.



They'd never trapped her like this before—alone, way out nowhere.

Editorial Reviews

Gr 6-9-Nellie is a 12-year-old orphan living in a shack in the Outbacks of a nameless dystopian world. Motivated by hunger, she makes forays into the city, trying to avoid the Skulls, a predatory male gang, as well as operatives of the corrupt Interior, who are responsible for the disappearance and probable death of her mother. The Skulls catch Nellie and shave her head, revealing wormlike scars, reminders of the insidious experiments the Interior has performed on kidnapped Outbacks children. Nellie is a devotee of the Goddess Ivana to whom she attributes the phenomenon of flux, "a quirk in the molecular field" that causes her surroundings to "shapeshift" and allows her body to take "strange wild forms." She has learned how to travel between levels of reality by stepping through hidden gates, a discovery that leads her on a quest for the truth about her mother. She also tries to help Deller, the street-smart leader of the Skulls whom she has befriended, search for his younger brother. The process of traveling between levels creates the problem of doubles-clonelike, unstable human duplicates- and the plot is burdened with confusing and contrived episodes. Lacking descriptive power and atmosphere, this novel uses the plot devices found in Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" series (Knopf) and Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time (Farrar, 1962), fantasies to which it cannot begin to compare.-Susan W. Hunter, Riverside Middle School, Springfield, VT Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

"Over and over again Goobie's lyrical turn of phrase shifts the meaning of this complexly plotted story deeper, taking it into the realm of the adolescent reader's own perception."

Toronto Sun

"The style...is evocative, thoughtful, complex and sophisticated.... Highly Recommended."

CM Magazine

"Goobie is a writer of huge ability and skill...a very impressive amalgam of action, imagination, and passionate, evocative prose."

Quill & Quire - Kenneth Oppel

"...will engage and intrigue young readers. Recommended."

Canadian Book Review Annual - Allison Sivak

Goobie is a writer of huge ability and skill...a very impressive amalgam of action, imagination, and passionate, evocative prose.
— Kenneth Oppel

Quill & Quire

...will engage and intrigue young readers. Recommended.
— Allison Sivak

Canadian Book Review Annual