Veronica

On a snowy night in February, at the improbable point in lower Manhattan where Waverly Place intersects Waverly Place, Leo meets Veronica for the first time. Starkly beautiful, mysterious, aloof, she leads him into a world where illusion blends seamlessly with reality - a luminously transformed city where powerful underground streams crisscross beneath the streets, a city of dragon-points and Tibetan mysticism, where real time is magically altered. Ten years have passed since Veronica's father, the famous magician Albin White, disappeared while performing a dangerous feat of time travel before a packed theater audience. White's disappearance was no accident: He was sabotaged by his apprentice Starwood, who interfered at a critical moment and sent him hurtling into the past, free to explore other eras but with no means of returning to the present.
Until Veronica finds Leo. Born in a year of unusual lunar cycles, Leo is the only person who can travel through time to contact White and receive his coded messages, messages that mobilize a remarkable case of characters to help in his return.

Contemporary New York becomes a shadowy hub of interdimensional travel in this wildly imaginative, postmodern tale of magic, mystery, murder and romance. On a snowy streetcorner in lower Manhattan, Leo, a 30-year-old freelance photographer, meets elusive, strangely beautiful Veronica, a magician's daughter and assistant. Lured to see her again, he is swept into a mystically disjointed world. Veronica's father disappeared during an ambitious time-travel demonstration sabotaged by Starwood, a jealous former apprentice who's now a dangerous practitioner of black magic. Veronica and a small group of family and friends have spent the last 10 years preparing to bring her father back from his limbo, and the bewildered Leo will be an important part of their perilous plan. Poet (5*) and novelist (The Soloist, 1986) Christopher's wryly evocative prose is laden with magical symbols and motifs drawn from Tibetan mysticism as well as European traditions. Dramatic imagery and swift pacing draw the reader into a bizarre but alluring mystery. Having researched Manhattan's subterranean water supplies and other invisible components of the city, Christopher creates a new, not quite fantastic map of the Big Apple. This darkly seductive tale maintains a dreamy urgency that keeps the reader intrigued until its poignant, hypnotic conclusion.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From its opening at the "improbable point where Waverly Place intersects Waverly Place," this phantasmagorical novel leads you on a magical mystery tour of Manhattan. Leo, the hero, is drawn into a family's attempt to reconnect (literally) with their magician father, who has been hijacked to a kind of limbo for the past ten years by a jealous apprentice. If you can suspend belief and accept time travel, arm-severing hoods, stairways that disappear as you walk down them, and twins with mirror-symmetrical eyes (one who looks 30, the other, 80), you will enjoy this ride. Christopher, who also writes short stories and poetry (Five Degrees and Other Poems, Penguin 1995), builds his world?rather, worlds?with a wealth of detail. Sometimes the characterization is weak, but this is not a tale of Sturm und Drang?it is a novel of incidents and magic. "A good lock when it's opened should sound like a pair of stones clicking underwater," the title character says early in this novel. Indeed, Christopher has unlocked a rich fantasy world that, despite being dangerous, is extremely enticing. Insert the key, strike the stones, read this book. Recommended for all fiction collections.?Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P. L., Bloomington, Ind.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

As oddly familiar as deja vu and as intriguing as moments of synchronicity, Veronica arrives with mystery, enticing and guiding us into other realms. In Manhattan, Leo (named for his mother's zodiac sign) accidentally meets Veronica fumbling for her keys at a "dragon-point" intersection, where Waverly Place crosses Waverly Place. From Tibetan restaurants to Neptune-theme apartments and clubs to Elizabethan England and beyond, Veronica takes him on a multilayered quest, mapped with signs and symbols like a treasure hunt, in an attempt to bring back her father, a famous magician lost through a gap in time when a trick is sabotaged by a rival. Veronica reflects Catherine Neville's chess-game strategizing and breathtaking pace in The Eight, Du Maurier's disorienting blurring of time in House on the Strand, and the strongly visual, rhythmic transitions, both jarring and elliptical, of films such as Jacob's Ladder, Blink, and Strange Days, but Christopher reconfigures, stretches, and reenvisions such techniques with grace and ingenuity, making this no copycat novel but a fresh and innovative novel for our times. It feeds our imagination, shuffles reality, and questions daily occurrences, life patterns, concepts of time, spiritual awareness, and love. This is an alchemist's fiction, and Christopher becomes both scientist and magician, creating a novel of great force, a nonstop, exciting page-turner, and more. Janet St. John