The Dream of the Stone

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 show more 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. show less

An Undiscovered Epic

Christian Askounis gives the reader a wonderful tale in The Dream of the Stone that will have you wanting more. It is the story of a young girl whose parents are killed in a plane crash. When her brother comes home, he reveals that he has a secret and it all revolves around the mysterious place he works way out in the desert. Sarah believes that company is more than a strange employer when she finds herself followed, meets a mysterious woman who appears many places, and when her ability to communicate with her brother is disrupted. Who are they? Where are they? Why are they after this stone her brother smuggled to her? With the help of a friend who has some mystery of his own, she finds herself transported to worlds show more unknown.
I have to say that this was one of the most delightful reads that I have encountered in a long time. It was a combination of C.S. Lewis meets Madeleine L’Engle. I am almost at a loss for words as this cannot fully describe how wonderful this story is. It is deep. If one reads Lewis and L’Engle, he/she will discover that their stories are more than just stories. They have so much depth to them that children who read them cannot possibly grasp all the messages there. Even adults would have to read and ponder the words. I found myself stopping to think of a phrase and what it means to me.
The characters are very interesting. They have you wanting to dive into them more and get to know them better. The plot is relatively fast paced. There were a few places where it slowed down, but it was necessary to get more information that was critical. From there it picked up again and took off on another fantastical ride.
Wonderfully crafted. The world Ms. Askounis brings to the reader is a fantasy world like no other. It is a story of the soul that has you wondering why the author has not done more. I need more of her great talent! The only thing that could make it better aside from another book would be discussion questions at the end as it has so many things that could be talked about. I’ll be telling many people about this book!

Note: This book was provided by a colleague with no expectation of a positive review. show less

Reviewed by Candace Cunard for TeensReadToo.com

Fourteen-year-old Sarah Lucas lives a wonderful life. In her youth, she traveled all over the world with her photojournalist parents, and now the family has settled down in a beautiful little farm on the East Coast. Sarah has a constant friend in her older brother, Sam, whose genius intelligence earned him his Ph.D. at eighteen and a job doing research for the mysterious Institute based in California. But Sarah's parents begin to worry about Sam's involvement with the Institute. The project he's working on is top secret, and so is much of the information about the Institute that has hired him. They fly to California to convince Sam to leave his job, but their plane crashes during their show more return flight, resulting in their deaths.

When Sam returns home for the funeral, he shares information about his research with Sarah, telling her about his experiments to develop a kind of "looking glass" that would allow people and things to be transported between different worlds by enlarging wormholes, tiny passages through spacetime. The newly-orphaned Sarah must deal with her grief, but also with her increasing suspicion that her parents were right about the Institute's sinister intentions for Sam's research. With the help of a strange old lady who appears first as a homeless woman, and later as Sarah's Latin teacher, she learns more about the Institute, and prompts Sam into reexamining the people for whom he works. The culmination of these events results in Sarah and Sam being stranded on an alien world that they reached through the powers of Sam's fully-functioning "looking glass."

Along the way, Sarah meets up with other characters, from this world and elsewhere. I especially loved Angel, the half-gypsy stable hand she meets while living with her aunt and uncle in New York City. The richness of Askounis's characterizations adds flavor to the novel, and real human depth to the conflict, which operates on the level of a grand battle between Good and Evil.

To me, it felt like a cross between the novels of Madeline L'Engle, C. S. Lewis, and Diane Duane, and I would recommend it highly to anyone who enjoys those writers. Like the best of those authors, Askounis writes compelling characters into a significant conflict, and does so with descriptive prose that portrays Earth just as dazzlingly as it delineates the alien world of Oneiros where the novel's climactic events occur. show less

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