Reviewed by Allison Fraclose for TeensReadToo.com
Against her better judgment, Sydney asks her friends, Anna and Eve, to do a tarot card reading for her.
Something is going on with her dad; she's afraid he may have lost his job again and that her mother might be too fed up with him this time for them to stay married. Although Sydney has never really believed that the cards can tell the future, both Anna and Eve have had such good luck with their recent readings--Anna getting a good boyfriend and Eve auditioning for a reality show--and Syd finally grows worried enough to find out what the future holds for her father.
Instead of reassuring her, the reading turns up bad, even ending with the Death card. Sydney swears that this is her punishment for trying to cheat the system and look ahead, but maybe it's not real. Maybe, if she believes hard enough, she can prevent her dad spiraling out of control and the breakdown of her family. She resolves that she's going to maintain her trust in her father, the only person who really understands her shyness, dedication to music, and love of all living things.
With Anna and Eve overly involved in their own lives and promising futures, Syd starts to feel that she and her friends are growing apart, and she doesn't have the tools to handle it yet. When things start to go awry in the lives of her friends, Sydney holds on to her hope that, if the cards were wrong about her friends, then maybe they were wrong about her father, too.
But then her father makes a devastating mistake that rips away Sydney's trust, and it becomes painfully obvious to Syd that there may be little she can do about her father's problems, or the changes that she and her friends must experience.
Third in a series, I enjoyed the characterizations and storytelling in this book so much that I'm going to be hunting down the first two books very soon. I also appreciated the author's approach to presenting tarot cards to younger readers, demonstrating how such fortune-telling techniques can be open to all kinds of interpretation, not necessarily good or bad.
Against her better judgment, Sydney asks her friends, Anna and Eve, to do a tarot card reading for her.
Something is going on with her dad; she's afraid he may have lost his job again and that her mother might be too fed up with him this time for them to stay married. Although Sydney has never really believed that the cards can tell the future, both Anna and Eve have had such good luck with their recent readings--Anna getting a good boyfriend and Eve auditioning for a reality show--and Syd finally grows worried enough to find out what the future holds for her father.
Instead of reassuring her, the reading turns up bad, even ending with the Death card. Sydney swears that this is her punishment for trying to cheat the system and look ahead, but maybe it's not real. Maybe, if she believes hard enough, she can prevent her dad spiraling out of control and the breakdown of her family. She resolves that she's going to maintain her trust in her father, the only person who really understands her shyness, dedication to music, and love of all living things.
With Anna and Eve overly involved in their own lives and promising futures, Syd starts to feel that she and her friends are growing apart, and she doesn't have the tools to handle it yet. When things start to go awry in the lives of her friends, Sydney holds on to her hope that, if the cards were wrong about her friends, then maybe they were wrong about her father, too.
But then her father makes a devastating mistake that rips away Sydney's trust, and it becomes painfully obvious to Syd that there may be little she can do about her father's problems, or the changes that she and her friends must experience.
Third in a series, I enjoyed the characterizations and storytelling in this book so much that I'm going to be hunting down the first two books very soon. I also appreciated the author's approach to presenting tarot cards to younger readers, demonstrating how such fortune-telling techniques can be open to all kinds of interpretation, not necessarily good or bad.
