After her grandmother gifts her a magical dreamcatcher, young Ruby Diamond finds herself transported to Starland, “a planet shinier than a glitter bomb,” where she is enrolled in The Aura Embassy. This beautiful crystal castle is where the “Royal Light Beings” are taught everything about light and how they can help humans by guiding their auras and sending them messages via prisms, rainbows, and other phenomena. Though Ruby is soon welcomed by the alien children, she discovers that there is a threat to the seemingly blissful planet. There is an “Other Place” where the “Dark Beings” dwell. They lurk around in the hope of devouring auras, and they are becoming more powerful. Now, Ruby and her skateboard must join the battle to save the light of the world.
GLOW IN THE DARK is T.J. Scripps’s debut book, a sci-fi-style fantasy for younger readers. Though initially a little difficult to follow, especially as the author builds her cast of characters and their worlds while trying to streamline the particular natural laws that govern them in the early chapters, the book introduces a memorable lead who is set to feature in future adventures.
Ruby Diamond, with her red hair and wild green eyes, was always different from her classmates. Some of them called her “the Martian Misfit” just because of her eyes. They even called her freckles “an extraterrestrial treasure map.” One night, she finds herself on a journey to a magical place. Like so many similar stories, there is some ambiguity as to whether the reader is supposed to take this hero’s journey at face value or as a fantasy second life. As Ruby writes in her diary: “I’d have told you aliens were totally not my thing. But then I got sucked into outer space and became the star of an alien world! And guess what? It all happened while I was snoozing in my bed!” Like Little Nemo in Slumberland or the movie version of Dorothy and Oz, Ruby’s adventures begin when she is sleeping. Is it real or a dream? Does that actually matter?
There are some excellent dream-like descriptions of Starland, where the streets are “lined with diamond-studded shops that shimmered in the dark. Glow-in-the-dark trees that stretched into the sky. Hovering geodes that drifted through the air… their cloaks shinier than polished diamonds.” There are also great details for the Aura Embassy itself, which “shimmered in the night sky, radiating with more colors than a rainbow after a storm.”
Underlying Scripps’s story is a kind of new-age sensibility that takes in ideas from crystal healing and aura reading as means to uncover and re-energize human problems. It’s quite a novel concept for a book for younger readers. The effect of light and crystals on people is taken as simple fact without venturing into pseudoscientific explanation. In one early passage, Ruby recites the names of crystals including amethyst, citrine, smoky quartz, and tiger’s eye: “Each word seemed to cast a spell as if she was reciting a magical incantation. The mist from the cloud beneath the castle billowed upwards like cotton candy, reaching for the stars.” Though it takes a little while for the author to build some narrative momentum, the story proves quite enthralling overall.
T.J. Scripps’s GLOW IN THE DARK is an inventive opening volume in an ongoing story. As the book progresses, readers will soon find they are invested in the strange adventure of this quirky new heroine.
~Kent Lane for IndieReader