Let me start with saying that anyone who is a fan of Madeline L’Engle’s Time Quartet ought to read this book.

Sarah’s world is turned upside down when her parents die in a plane crash on their way back home from visiting her genius brother, Sam. Sam has been working at CIPHER, a company that no one knows anything about no matter how much they try to discover, and his parents had been trying to convince him to look into why this company is so secretive. After their parents death and funeral, Sam goes back to work at CIPHER, creating a machine that will allow people to travel to other planets, and even though Sarah wants nothing more than to live with Sam now that they’re on their own, she is sent to live with her father’s step brother, whom she barely knows. That’s only the beginning of when things start to get interesting – someone leaves her notes in the library, a strange man follows her, and she has caught the eye of a cute boy who seems to be intent on protecting her.

When she receives a package from her brother containing a stone, however, things really start to get strange. Soon Sarah and Angel (the cute boy) are brought to a new planet by the stone, and Sarah has to try to find her brother in hopes that they can all get back to earth safely.

I knew from the first paragraph that not only would I love this book, but that I had found a kindred spirit in Sarah:

Outside the March sky was gray and overcast, threatening snow, but in Sarah Lucas’s room a fire blazed in the blue-tiled fireplace, and the lamp beside her canopy bed cast a cheerful light. Balancing Wuthering Heights on her knees, she poured a second cup of tea from the small brown teapot on the bedside table, took a bite of toast, and licked the honey from her fingers. There was homework to be done, but it could wait.

This was quite the engaging book. The characters were all fabulously developed, the plot was exciting, and it took me to places my imagination reveled in. I love good stories where the characters travel to new worlds, when the author can pull off creating a believable world that is so different than ours.

The is perhaps one of the reasons that The Dream of the Stone reminded me quite a bit of L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. These two books have so many of the same elements – the journey to another world to rescue a family member, the darkness threatening to take over the universe, the young girl developing the strength to fight off the darkness, the subtle Christian theme throughout… and yet, and the same time they are so different. In this one the main differences being that a stone brings Sarah to this new world instead of three immortal beings, and the darkness is coming FROM our world, not coming TO our world. And then there is the fact that this book isn’t as cheesy as Wrinkle. Don’t get me wrong, I love A Wrinkle in Time – it has always been one of my favourite books. But it can get cheesy. Need I mention Calvin stating that Meg has “dream-boat eyes”?

I also found that The Dream of the Stone felt more modern than Wrinkle. I think it was the way the characters acted, as there wasn’t much mention of technology that could have defined this book to coming from a certain era. I mean, yes, Sarah’s brother Sam is creating a machine that uses worm holes to send people across the universe, and normally human technology like that is considered to be from the future, but as the technology he’s using to create this machine isn’t fully described it could very well take place at almost any point in time. If I hadn’t known that this book was originally written over a decade ago, I would have completely believed it had only been written a few years ago because it doesn’t talk a lot about technology, and technology changes so quickly that it can date a book so fast too. Oh wow, I’m starting to ramble now.

What it comes down to is that this is a positively brilliant book, and Sabrina was positively right in telling me that I needed to read The Dream of the Stone. This will be sitting alongside Wrinkle on my bookshelf and will be pulled out time and again to be reread.