Wade Jackson has always felt split, his love for playing and writing music competing with his ambition to do well in school. But when his mother dies, this need for order competes with his desire to leave it all behind. What follows is a split in his consciousness that takes him to two very different worlds.

Told in alternating chapters that together form one cohesive story, Split follows both Wades as they pursue what they think is the correct path. One Wade continues working hard in school, pulling all-nighters to write a computer code he believes will save the world. The other Wade pursues the dream of being a dive-bar singer, pulling all-nighters to party, gamble, and live on the edge. But when these two worlds begin to collide, each Wade will need to find a balance between control and abandon, order and chaos, life missed and life lost, in order to save himself.

"Petrucha offers a reality-bending take on the idea of split personalities. After the death of Wade’s mother in the prologue, the story jumps ahead three years and unfolds in alternating chapters, both narrated by Wade but in two very different realities. In one, the high school senior is a Type-A aspiring scientist, anxious to prove a theory that modifications to the town’s particle collider are a potentially deadly threat; in the other, the particle collider has been closed down and Wade is a selfish, guitar-playing dropout, who gets involved with some dangerous mobsters. Which universe and which Wade are real (if the answer is even one or the other) gets murkier as reality shifts, culminating in a meeting of the two Wades, but there are enough textual and visual cues (different fonts for each Wade, among other elements) that will allow readers to follow. Though both story lines and the dialogue lean toward the melodramatic, Petrucha’s story should leave readers considering the power of fate versus choice and the internal urges and desires that regularly jostle for control. " Publishers Weekly

STEFAN PETRUCHA is the author of many novels for teens, including Teen, Inc., The Rule of Won, the TimeTripper series, the Nancy Drew graphic novels, and the Wicked Dead series. He lives in Massachusetts.

Link: www.petrucha.com

Author: STEFAN PETRUCHA

Add date: 2010-02-20