REVIEWS




PRINT! KINDLE! And now an AUDIBLE AUDIO BOOK!

"I laughed, cried, felt the urgency . . . the story will take you to another dimension of 'ahhh' moments of reflection and insight that will 'gotcha.' I could read this book again and again and get something more. I enjoyed i from the second I began to read."

"A thick slice of MaryAnn Easley pie. Oozing UFOs, sweet on science, and warm with fantasy. This veteran children's writer's many young fans should be satiated.....for now!"

Friday, January 1, 2016

BRAIN CANDY FOR THE YA READER

Similar theme exist in ALICE IN WONDERLAND & CHANGED IN THE NIGHT

Life-death, time-space, reality-dreams are only a few of the themes that exist in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and CHANGED IN THE NIGHT.


What is time and space? If the past is only a dream and the future does not yet exist, then is the present moment the only reality we have?

Are UFOS real? Is there more than one Universe? Who are we and where do we come from?


In this modern day Alice in Wonderland story, Allana Odette Blair is plunged into similar philosophical and scientific themes. For example, when Alice falls down the rabbit hole, she experiences abandonment and extreme loneliness; Allana in CHANGED IN THE NIGHT suffers abandonment and loneliness after being visited and marked by aliens. Both girls are cast into an alien world that's beyond reality and both are lost psychologically, trapped in solitude and misunderstood.

Growing up is the death of childhood; therefore, death is closely connected to the protagonists in both the Wonderland story and CHANGED IN THE NIGHT. Death permeates Alice's enchanted garden in Wonderland where the Queen of Hearts appears to be the Goddess of Death, and death hovers in Allana's painted forest where her dead brother taunts her and leads her into more complicated puzzles.


In the Alice in Wonderland story, there's much to decipher, and this is also true in CHANGED IN THE NIGHT. The theme of Time and Space exist in both stories. Alice has the Mad Hatter; Allana has Mr. Zee, and we learn about time and space through these characters. We think of time in hours, minutes, and seconds or days, weeks, months, and years. The Mad Hatter's watch shows the date, not the time; at one point, the Mickey Mouse clock in CHANGED IN THE NIGHT is missing an hour; the cuckoo in the clock over the kitchen table is permanently stuck half in and half out of the little door.

Unlike us, a clock can repeat its measure of duration. We live in the conscious knowledge that we can never go back to a given point in the past even though we can turn the hands of a clock back or move them forward. Because of psychological time, however characters in both Alice in Wonderland and CHANGED INTHE NIGHT can leave and return to the same place. Allana can hear Great-Aunt Grace give advice and she can see her brother Jack, now grown.

There's nothing straightforward or simple in CHANGED IN THE NIGHT. Everything is cause and effect. One door leads to another. After Allana accidentally kills her twin brother, Jack, nothing is the same again. I deliberately chose the death date as December 7, 1941—the day Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor—because it led to America dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a few years later. And this began the never-ending arms race so that today countries all over the globe have in their possession nuclear power, a capability that can destroy planet Earth.

War is constant, death inevitable, and grief a given. Our science has created destructive power that is greater than our ability to contain it. We have become instruments of our own destruction.

Symbolism and metaphor prevail in both stories.
At sixteen, Allana cannot bear the burden of her grief but she also cannot let it go. Her grief is all she has of her slain brother. We are all connected; when we kill our brother, we kill ourselves.

Like Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Allana in CHANGED IN THE NIGHT is stuck in a limbo of sorts where nothing is quite as it seems. In both the classic story and the new release,   symbolism sprinkled throughout in doors, riddles, puzzles and time; therefore the protagonists must deal with a lot of metaphoric "smoke and mirrors" in story, dreams, and reality.

After Allana's abduction by aliens, her psychological world unravels even further. UFOs, however, might be the ultimate reality or wake-up call, the government's long kept secret, the reason for the arms buildup, as well as, the men in black, and the sudden early retirement of Uncle Gordon from the Air Force.



Through Mr. Zee, her not-so-human tutor, Allana learns about Occam's Razor, Einstein's E = mc2, and Schrödinger's Cat; 
she discovers that science is a double-edged sword; there's good and evil in all, and reality is not what it seems.


She also discovers that anything is possible—even loving the enemy—and that letting go might be the bravest act of all.