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Book Review: Jigsaw of Light

IndieBookView

March 4

Jigsaw of Light

by JC Button

Genre: Young Adult / Fantasy / Adventure

ISBN: 9781399967150

Print Length: 324 pages

Reviewed by Andrea Marks-Joseph

When we first meet fifteen-year-old Zebedee, he's lonely in London, exhausted from constant nightmares of dramatic waves that ruin his sleep and missing his father who mysteriously disappeared three years ago to the day.

On the anniversary of his father's disappearance, Zeb receives an urgent and secretive letter from his father, urging him to retrieve a package from the post office and bring it back to his hometown of Cornwall. As soon as he retrieves the package, Zeb notices he's being followed by dangerous-looking people, managing to narrowly escape and reach Cornwall, where his quirky, loving grandfather hands him a surfboard passed down from Zeb's father—one that supernaturally travels the world.

Zeb learns to connect to the board on a spiritual, instinctual level so that its internal GPS (along with a journal of cryptic riddles written by his dad for Zeb to decode) forms an instructive map for the teenager's quest: Zeb must collect the remaining crystals from an ancient mission that his father disappeared completing. It's a journey to save the earth from its rapidly declining climate crisis, but Zeb agrees mostly in the hope that he may find his father along the way.

Zeb surfs the oceans to Syria (where he meets a young man who helps families flee to safety after bombing), the Hawaiian Islands (where he meets a professor's defiant daughter who is rightfully angry, having to educate him on the damage that tourism has done to her home), and Australia (where they bargain with a drunken tour guide over crocodile notoriety).

Each place Zeb visits, there is someone expecting him, someone who spent time with his dad and was told he'd be coming. While this is helpful, it also comes with a level of heartache that Zeb keeps to himself, because it means that his dad spent time with all of these people, making lovely memories and even telling them about his son, while Zeb was taken away from his hometown and left to think his dad was dead.