Sapphique

Sapphique by Catherine Fisher

The hardest reviews to sit down to are the ones of books that left me disappointed. That is a horrible sentence, but I simply don’t care. A rewrite would leave me disappointed. Last night, I almost posted that I liked the movie Slumdog Millionaire better than the last two books I’ve read. I don’t know but that means the movie was truly Oscar worthy. The dance sequence at the end left me smiling and wanting to dance. The books left me no such motivation.


Should I even bother to write the reviews… It was someone else’s review that left me with higher hopes…

Sapphique is the second part of what turned out to be a really long book. The first half is called Incarceron (review) which I added to my list of favorite dystopian novels. (The list is actually taking physical form, slowly.) You will most likely find the two in Young Adult collections. I would recommend it to voracious, junior high readers through 20-somethings. I would call it complex or difficult, but in positive terms. It is a book for thinkers. If you like conundrums …

As proof that different readers read books differently, I will present you with a snippet of the recommendation I received. I was told that a character hidden in plain sight became a major player concerning the outcome of the story. I truly appreciate the fact that I was given glowing recommendations in extremely vague terms so as not to give away any secrets. However. Their character that was “hidden in plain sight” was perhaps my favorite character and so I always had high hopes for the role that person would play in the end. Ugh. I spent a good portion of the book paying closer attention to lesser, in my opinion, characters. Misdirection. Sleight of Hand. Illusion.

Interesting. A great portion of this book deals with the Art of Illusion, Magic. Nothing being what it seems.

Sapphique begins where Incarceron ended. Finn is on the Outside with Claudia, but Claudia’s father, the Warden of Incarceron, is in the Inside of the prison. Claudia has two problems now. She must prove that Finn is the Crown Prince of the Realm even though he still has troubles with his memory and he is not very convincing as royalty. He looks and acts more like the prisoner that he has been inside Incarceron. Her second problem is getting into contact with her father. He is the only one who knows where Incarceron is and how to get in and out. She is also in desperate need of his authority and power in the Realm.

Claudia knew that Incarceron had awakened and had become a thinking entity, but she is unaware of a new problem. Incarceron is no longer satisfied with his own “realm”. He wants to come Outside. He wants to escape like Sapphique. And he needs a body to do it.