Another Faust -- Daniel and Dina Nayeri
One night, five ten-year-olds disappear from four different cities:
In London: Victoria, who wants to win
In Glasgow: Christian, who wants money
In Rome: Belle, who wants beauty, along with her studious identical twin sister Bicé
In Paris: Valentin, who wants fame
No one ever misses them. Once they're gone, it's like the world forgot that they ever existed.
Five years later, five teenagers show up in New York City with their governess, Madame Vileroy, and proceed to take Manhattan's prestigious Marlowe School by storm. To give them an advantage over the other students and a better chance at achieving their goals, Madame Vileroy has given each of them a powerful gift—mind-reading, energy drain, control over time, beauty—but, as the Faust children are beginning to realize, each of those gifts has its own drawbacks... and even worse, a hefty price tag.
So, yeah. It sounds like Gossip Girl meets Faust, right? In some ways, that's what it is: rich kids behaving badly, lots of in-fighting and back-stabbing and social climbing and so on. The major difference—beyond that whole selling-their-souls-to-the-Devil thing—between Another Faust and Gossip Girl (or Private, or the Clique, or any number of other similar series) is that Another Faust doesn't overshare.
The reader doesn't get a play-by-play of every emotion/thought/action that every character feels/thinks/takes in every single scene. Depending on who the narrator is following at the moment, that's what you get. While I guarantee that some readers will hate that—they'll want to know exactly what Valentin just did, or what Bicé is up to, or what went down between Victoria and Lucy—I liked it. Getting a somewhat limited view of the overall action made the story seem more real—like I was a fly on the wall, being an active voyeur, rather than simply sitting back and listening to a story.
Which means that, as the reader, you parallel Victoria's actions. Which, if deliberate, is a pretty wonderfully twisted move on the authors' part.
Despite the genre and a decent amount of action, Another Faust is more meditative than you'd expect. The gloomy, almost oppressive atmosphere slows the pace down, as do the frequent shifts in focus, and the Faust kids—well, the ones who haven't quite decided if they're in or out—do a lot of philosophical mulling over ambition, achievement, and morality.
Overall, it's fun, dark stuff with some clever bits beyond the Faust name. Each chapter begins with a snippet about one of Madame Vileroy's many bargains made throughout history, but my favorite nod is the one to Nathaniel Hawthorne: the boy Belle pursues—and some of the other kids use as well—is named Thomas Goodman-Brown.
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Book source: ILLed through my library.