Nine Levels (Mirror World Publishing)
by Elana Gomel
Cleo wakes up, groggy and salt-encrusted, on a Mediterranean beach in Greece after a midnight party. She’s a British-Greek tourist, but slowly realizes she’s not actually in Greece any longer. Or at least, she’s not in her Greece. Her first clue is a man who sits on the other end of her bench with a giant living golden spider on his forearm. the next clue is the huge mountain in the center of the island where only a small rocky protuberance used to be.
The town looks like where she had been on vacation, but there is no technology and all of her friends are missing. Her credit cards and phone are missing, too, so she has to work. And she cannot get off the island, even after bribing a sea captain. They were turned back by a giant cyclops! What the heck had happened?
Cleo learns that the mountain has nine levels. Still grieving the unsolved disappearance of her twin sister Cora, she gets a message that this is where Cora disappeared to and that her sibling is further up the mountain, perhaps at its very top. The place has nine levels, and she cannot climb it unless she is “called.” You have to go up. You have to find your sister.
When the call comes she enters a world whose rules she does not understand and whose inhabitants seem to invert everything she thought she knew about Greek mythology. Who is trustworthy, what is safe, what is dangerous–all theses change with each level as things get stranger and stranger because the dark elements of Greek mythology are now in charge.
And despite touches of our world on the mountain everything is not what it seems, but everything seems bent on killing her.
I especially liked the sentient graffiti as well as the hidden avatars of Greek gods and goddesses like Hermes, Apollo, Athena, and Arachne–all gone haywire. There are riddles within riddles, and unexpected friends along the way. And I did not see the ending coming.