#7 REVERIE WEST AND THE ONEIRONAUTS, MG Fantasy

TITLE: Reverie West and the Oneironauts
GENRE: MG - Fantasy

After six lonely years living in Asylum Island’s rickety-crickety lighthouse with only her father for company, eleven-year-old Reverie West is more than ready to set sail with the five mysterious visitors who wash ashore one summer night. What she may not be ready for is their destination – Oneiros, home of dreams, nightmares, and Revi’s long-lost mother.

When the lighthouse on Asylum Island turned on, it had been one hundred and three days since Reverie West had seen anyone other than her father. Revi knew it had been that long because she kept track in one of her journals; the journal was entitled Human Contact or Lack Thereof: An Accounting of Days, and it was filled with dates and tally marks. Her record was two hundred and twenty-six days – forty-five hatch-marked sets and one lonely line. Some record.

Revi was all alone most of the time for at least two reasons. The first was quite simply that she lived on Asylum Island. Just a heap of rocks in the middle of the ocean, the island was surrounded by a notoriously treacherous reef that could smash the hull of a ship to smithereens. So, understandably, most ships avoided it.

If someone had really wanted to get to the island, there was a twisty-turny route through the reef’s sharp rocks and coral. But – and this was the second reason that Revi was all alone – no one did really want to get to Asylum Island.

As far as Revi could tell, no one even knew that she and her father had been living in the island’s lighthouse for the past six years. There was no reason anyone would know. The lighthouse's light had never turned on, and the lighthouse itself, a rusty monstrosity that tilted rather alarmingly to one side, was certainly no tourist attraction.

On particularly windy nights, Revi would lie awake listening to the metal joints creaking and groaning and think that if the whole thing happened to topple into the ocean, no one would notice.
At least that was what she thought until the night the lighthouse turned on.