5Q 5P J S "When Frank McDermott's young daughter, Lizzie, overhears a conversation between her parents about Frank's unfinished works, she is frightened; when she sneaks from the house to the barn where he works, she witnesses horrific events involving a transformation of her father into a monster. When her mother burns the barn down and leaves with Lizzie, readers meet Emma, the other main character. Emma's professor, Kramer, threatens to fail her because she plagiarized (or did she?) the famous writer Frank McDermott's work. But Emma never read the book, so where did her thoughts come from? Are Emma's thoughts and ideas coming from within her, from her blackouts--called 'blinks'--that take her into alternate worlds? Emma meets a series of other characters: Eric and Casey, brothers who have escaped an abusive father by shooting him; Rima, whose mother is an alcoholic who tried to kill her; Bode and Chad, who are enlisted in the Army; and Tania, who is really Anita. All the characters try to escape monsters and other horrifying creatures unleashed from the white space, and Lizzie eventually shows Emma how to pull her own stories from white space, which is a blank page waiting to be written with symbols and ideas. "Emma is the thread that binds the entire story together and uses a cynosure as a way to focus and show the way for all the characters to follow to escape the horrors. The characters are well written, the descriptions of the horrors they witness are blood curling, and the end is a shocker. She has lived through a difficult experience, and her mind is helping her escape it.

This is a fascinating, intricate story with multiple threads running through it. It is a combination of mystery, science fiction, and horror--an exciting page-turner. Readers will devour it and want the next book immediately." --starred, The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books.