Review by Deboah K Frontiera
Ad Lucem is a young adult novel, part fantasy and part coming-of-age story set in the present time, presents fourteen-year-old Adam Sozie as a confused loner. The story is set in a fictional version of the Copper Country in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. His parents have recently divorced,
and he has become a “video game zombie”. His mother, a nurse, is concerned about him and decides he needs to spend time with his paternal grandmother. His father disapproves of this arrangement, harboring bitter feelings about his childhood. Nonetheless, Adam must ride his bike to his grandmother’s mansion on top of a cliff to “help” her with her garden.
There, readers are introduced to his eccentric grandmother and her “collection” of a family: an aunt who is his father’s sister, and a group of people with various disabilities, which includes autism, blindness, wheelchair bound, one who doesn’t talk, etc. But each of these people becomes part of Adam’s life, along with many mysteries and unanswered questions about his father’s and grandfather’s past.
After a few visits, Adam confides in his only friend, Abe, trying to describe his grandmother and her menagerie of “misfits” making “a pretty juicy story” for his friend. After all, nothing out of the ordinary ever happens to either of them. Unfortunately, word of this manages to get around school, and a collection of “friends” follow Adam and Abe to Grandma’s place where they proceed to ridicule everyone. Adam is mortified.
Adam’s father becomes angry when Adam asks questions about his grandfather and forbids him from going to his grandmother’s house again—yeah, and what teenager listens to that?
Readers, along with Adam, come to know these diverse characters and see them in a new light. Adam begins to unravel the many mysteries surrounding his family, especially when his grandmother gives him a magic stone which allows him to “see” holographic videos of the past. While these answer some questions, they bring up even more mysteries. Multiple points of view are presented through his mother and father, and some of his father’s colleagues who also teach at the local university. The plot becomes more complicated, and Adam finds that he is in mortal danger due to some of them.
As a reader, I found many of the plot points confusing, but I decided that was the author’s intention since Adam is also confused. The author uses very good chapter hooks, so I kept turning pages hoping to understand what was going on. At one point, Adam visits one of his father’s colleagues and shows him the “magic stone”. After doing a chemical analysis, this friend advises Adam to take the stone to the police immediately. Of course, Adam doesn’t follow this advice either.
It is difficult to mix fantasy and reality in a contemporary setting. In a fantasy, the reader must be able to enter another world or suspend belief while reading. Monica Aho does this fairly well. But sometimes, reality and fantasy collide in impossible situations (surviving a fall down a cliff uninjured, for example) that are hard to believe or make it more difficult to suspend disbelief. Some scenes that seem weird or impossible in the real world might be fine in a magical one. But mixing the two is tricky and doesn’t always work.
Another problem I had with the book was that while the author fictionalized the names of some places, she used a few real place names in the Keweenaw Peninsula along with the fictional ones. The example that bothered me the most was the description of Grandmother’s mansion on the clifftop near a river that goes over a waterfall shortly before entering Lake Superior. I’ve hiked a lot of different places along the western shore of the Keweenaw, and there are not that many decent-sized rivers that enter Lake Superior on that side. Eagle River is the only one with a waterfall close to Lake Superior, but that leaves Adam (and all those “friends”) with a twenty-three-mile trip, one way, by bicycle on those days after school. The same area was described in another event in which Adam and another character were on foot the entire distance. This was annoying to me since I know the area. It probably wouldn’t be a problem for readers who don’t live in the Keweenaw. However, if readers are looking for a great “page turner”, Ad Lucem certainly keeps you engaged in the plot.
Ad Lucem By Monica Aho
ISBN 979-8-266398-82-5, Ret. $15.99 (Amazon) Kindle $5.99, published 2025, no company listed
