Weave a Circle Round

By: Kari Maaren

Narrated by: Eileen Stevens

Discover your inner child once again in this debut fantasy adventure for fans of Madeleine L'Engle, Diana Wynne Jones, and E. L. Konigsburg.

Freddy doesn't want people to think she's weird. Her family makes that difficult, though: her deaf stepbrother Roland's a major geek, and her genius little sister Mel's training to be the next Sherlock Holmes. All Freddy wants is to survive high school.

Then two extremely odd neighbors move in next door.

Cuerva Lachance and Josiah definitely aren't normal. Neither is their house, which defies the laws of physics. Neither is Freddy's situation, when she suddenly finds herself stuck thousands of years in the past with her very, very weird neighbors. And that's only the beginning.

©2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc. (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Superbly crafted

What a wonderful surprise from a first-time author this book turned out to be. Similar to Stephen King's Dark Tower series, a line from a classic poem serves as the foundational title to this book. With a sense of home often felt in a Madeline L'engle book, the female lead of the story takes us through a mystery and adventure that was not made using the same flimsy, dystopian future cookie cutter that has been used by so many popular teen angst books of late. they all have the same feel. This book was unique and refreshing and left me guessing as to whether or not I had figured out the mystery up until the very end.
There is no worse language in the book than you would find in an intense Star Trek the Next Generation episode. There is nothing even approaching sexually explicit. And best of all, nobody sparkles.

Great performance of a not great book

I struggled to finish, almost every character was annoying and poorly written. I just over the stereotype of teens who can only communicate in shouts and shrugs.

Fast paced fun

This was a delightful story to listen to, with magic and mayhem, time travel and soul searching. Freddy feels like a misfit at home living with her absentee mother, an equally absent step-father, a stepbrother she literally can’t communicate with because he’s deaf, and a younger sister that is too smart for her own good. School is no better for Freddy, where she wonders why she hangs out with her so-called friends and deals with all the social problems of starting high school. Then she meets a strange lady who gives her a key, and new neighbors crash the house next door. Things can only get more interesting from there.

The narrator did a great job of revealing the characters throughout the book. She kept the pace and tone of the story moving along, enhancing the author’s vision.