Lyrics & Curses

Gr 8 Up–Lark just wants to get through one more year of high school working alongside her best friend Imani at the oddities shop, ignoring her not-at-all-similar twin Paloma, and forgetting her mostly absent mother before she leaves everything behind. Maybe not everything. Certainly not her backpack full of cassettes and maybe not Auden, the cute, brooding boy at the music shop. Lark and Auden are tied together by a haunting melody of David Bowie on flute that follows each of them through town. Then a stranger leaves a mirror at the shop that serves as a portal to a mirror dimension. Lark and Auden are increasingly haunted and must break the curse before their mirrored selves take their place in the mortal world, trapping the real Lark and Auden. This book, set to be the first in a duology, proposes excitement—paranormal adventures set in the 1980s—but fails to fully deliver. Lark and Auden have all the markers of being sympathetic characters with troubled home lives, complicated pasts, and a budding romance, but remain stagnant until a forced conclusion, which includes paranormal elements that are introduced late in the story, resulting in incomplete worldbuilding. Lark and Auden are both white and Lark’s father was of Spanish descent.