The modern day merges with Arthurian legend in The Eighth Day by Dianne K Salerni!
After a terrible accident that killed his family, 12 year old Jax is put in the care of his older cousin Riley. Jax wakes up the day after his thirteenth birthday to find the world gone crazy – silent, empty of people, with no electricity and a strange purple sky. He has discovered the Eighth Day, a magical extra day between Wednesday and Thursday that only a select few people can experience. But this new day is plunged into danger when Jax learns of a wizard who wants to destroy the magical spell keeping the Eighth day separate from the rest of time, and he (along with Riley, who is not what he seems) must fight to keep the timeline intact.
The plot of this book reminds me intensely of The Midnighters Trilogy by Scott Westerfeld. In that series, there’s an extra hour between 12:00 and 12:01 am that only certain people can access. The Eighth Day is similar, but with a whole day instead of an hour.
Salerni gives her story a bunch of unique twists, like attaching the magical day to a spell cast by none other than Merlin himself. Jax is your typical YA protagonist, but there are a variety of interesting characters filling out the cast, as well as tons of magic. To be honest, I generally find Arthurian legends to be boring, but this story modernized and spiced them up quite well!
I enjoyed this book, and I’ll be looking out for more by Dianne Salerni. I’d like to see this story turned into a movie!
Cover Report: The cover features a cityscape with THE EIGHTH DAY in giant letters, with a boy running into a doorway made by the “I”. Very unique and cool! I give this cover an A.
Typo Police: No real typos. Jax gets a message online from a girl who says “your new” instead of “you’re new”, but this is obviously meant to be a deliberate misspelling in a casual message.
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