So, it goes like this. Wake up Tuesday morning with sharp stabbing pains to the abdomen. Make the requisite fast, short trip to small room. Figure I’m okay to go to work anyhow. A few hours later, reconsider, go home, and put up with the short stabbing pains, some flu symptoms and the short trips to small room for Tuesday and Wednesday. All better now, but not fun.

During the above, as I also temporarily contemplated the collapse of the Strahan/Jablon business empire (it ain’t, but you know how it looks that way sometimes), I figured I wanted to read something, something comforting and cosy. With that in mind, I temporarily set aside The Summer Isles, which is fine and dandy, and went looking for something on the shelves that was more in keeping with rainy afternoons and self-pity. Hmmm. There’s nothing quite like a good YA novel for such situations, so I pulled out Justine‘s Magic or Madness. She’d kindly given me a copy of the galley in Boston last year, and I’d put it on the ‘to read’ shelf, meaning to get to it.

Well, Magic or Madness is delicious. It’s the story of the requisitely plucky Reason, a young Australian girl who has been on the run from her wicked grandmother for most of her life. While there’s much we don’t know at the outside, we know there’s an evil witch, some strangeness about ammonites, mathematics and magic, at least one descent into madness, and the threat of early death for our heroine. There’s also a door into winter, a magic portal that links the suburbs of Sydney directly to the streets of Manhattan. It was a book I really enjoyed, sprinting through its pages in no time at all. I think I can see the pattern to the story – it’s the first in a trilogy – but I can’t wait to see what happens next.

So, should you read it? Yes! Should you go buy/order it now? Yes! Did I wonder if Reason was pretty much Justine, from the pants full of pockets to the trips from Sydney to New York – yes. It’s way cool. And Justine, I want the next one. Really. Soon.