VANDELLA

Love and self-sacrifice catapult a dying teenager into the eerie realms of a terrifying underworld in this YA novel.

Seventeen-year-old Maia yearns after high school star quarterback Jase. But she lacks the confidence to try to shift their relationship out of the friend zone, especially after her childhood cancer returns and she ends up in the hospital with an iffy prognosis for survival. When a darkly clad stranger appears, prepared to take the soul of her grandmother—the teen’s only family—asleep by her bedside, Maia offers her own soul in exchange for her beloved relative’s life. The teen’s only condition: that she be reunited with her mother, who died giving birth to her. From here, Landa spins readers headlong into a jarring but intriguing odyssey through an underworld where dreams and nightmares trump logic. Calling himself Sidney, the stranger reveals that Maia’s soul-for-a-soul trade isn’t a done deal until she takes her grandmother’s place “in the pilgrimage of death,” bearing the medallion of Lazarus to “Death itself.” Neither dead nor alive, Maia finds herself on an old-fashioned steam train, targeted by gunmen and careening through a hurricane, earthquake, and fire. Soon, the train converges on a city where Old West cowboys mix with Roman guards, “cybergoth” girls, and knights of old. Finding disturbing revelations and bleak philosophical pronouncements along the way (“Death is no liberation from the joy and misery of life”), Maia progresses on foot through a foreboding forest with an escort of dead World War II soldiers, a vampiric guardian, and a demon-hunting Russian sniper who, in the book’s most horrific touch, packs bullets with his own flesh. After eventually confronting her own past and shattered expectations, Maia faces her ultimate, sacrificial test. The relentless stream of strangeness, rooted in magic realism, snags here and there on teen soap-opera mundanity (first-person narrator Maia labels enigmatic, shape-shifting, eternal Sidney “an arrogant, unabashed jerk” and the “type all women know too well”). But the series opener’s string of bizarre events is the impetus to keep reading. So is the discovery that the author has adroitly inserted certain fantastical plot points on the way to a moving resolution in the “real” world.

A bumpy but vivid mix of adolescent angst and wildly untethered, nightmarish fantasy.