Book Review: Hourglass by Myra McEntire

Emerson Cole has spent the last 4 years pretty sure that she's crazy.  She sees people from the past.  Southern belles, jazz trios, guys in cravats - all ghosts that dissipate when she touches them.  It started just a few weeks before her parents died in a horrible bus accident, and has only been getting worse since.  Her brother, Thomas, is an architect who renevates old buildings in her small Southern town, and since Emerson sees (and hears) ghosts in the places they lived, this makes things a bit, well... haunted.

Her boarding school scholarship mysteriously dried up and sick of feeling like numb zombie, Emerson is off her meds (Thomas is on a need-to-know basis, and this is something he definately doesn't need to know) and back home for her senior year of high school.  She just wants things to be normal, which means not telling Thomas about the southern belle she had to walk through to get in her front door.  And then she meets the gorgeous Michael at Thomas's restaurant opening gala.  The last in a long line of therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, mediums, and other useless frauds employed by her well-meaning brother to help her, Michael is a consultant for a mysterious organization known as the Hourglass.  When Michael tells Emerson that he can help her and that she's not crazy, she is extremely wary - until Michael reveals that he, too, can see and hear the jazz trio from the 1920s playing at the party.

Things get even stranger when Emerson discovers that she and Michael have a connection so electric that it literally blows out light bulbs when they touch each other.  When Michael finally reveals that her ability to see people from the past is just part of the amazing power she possesses -and what they have the potential to become together - Emerson's whole world is blown apart.  Because it turns out that Michael is not only there to help her manage her powers, but he desperately needs her help - to turn the clock back on death.

Reading this book was just like savoring a frappuccino on a hot July day - cool, fresh, delicious, and keeps you awake til it's finished!  With a unique twist on time travel, great characters (Thomas's wife Dru is awesome, and I seriously want Emerson's friend Lily to be my BFF - and make me a cappuccino!) and some seriously sizzling romantic tension between Emerson and Michael, you'll want to curl up and inhale this gothic thriller in one sitting.  Check out Hourglass @ the library!

Megan
(who's loving Wrapped by Jennifer Bradbury - nothing like a good tale of a ancient Egyptian mummy's curse in Regency London on a summer afternoon!)