Well written and magical. A very entertaining book.
Many thanks to Scholastic and to NetGalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion.

Madeleine Tully is a 14 year old girl living in Cambridge, England, with her mother after being uprooted from her "real" life after she and her mother, Holly, ran away from her father. They had been fabulously wealthy and now they struggled to live on much less. Elliot Baranshi is a 15 year old boy who lives in Bonfire, The Farms, in the Kingdom of Cello, His father went missing a year ago and he spends most of his time trying to find him. These two wildly different kids discover a crack between their two worlds, completely by accident, and start sending notes to each other.

I enjoyed this book very much. The descriptive language used was beautiful and conjured up pictures in my mind of the ordinary and the extraordinary alike. Madeleine was a bit of a spoiled brat, who was very self centered, but that's probably because she was used to having anything she wanted in her previous life. I liked her friends, Jack and Belle, just fine, though. Elliot was definitely the more likeable of the two. He was kind and earnest and thought of others before himself all the time. Our journey with Elliot and Madeleine was one of mutual discovery, but I think they learned much more through their letters by asking questions and then looking inwards for the answers, so there was character growth for both of them. The world building was done very well and made this an even more enjoyable read.

In summary, I enjoyed this book as much for the beautiful, descriptive language used by the author as for the plot, which was also done well.

4.5 stars.

Thank you Netgalley for the early copy of this book. I started reading this book, and while I enjoyed the premise and the writing style, I just don't think I'm a good fit. It's definitely a me thing, but at this time I don't believe I'll continue reading this story.

Jaclyn Moriarty creates a whimsical world using beautiful language. She's truly a talented writer. This is a great book for teens looking for a unique story.

Its a page turner. The first few chapters are confusing, but in the end you'll be glad you read this fantasy about lost people....and there are two more books in the series. If you are an adult who loves Young Adult books, you'll enjoy this.

I waited entirely too long to read this and as I went to pick it up, I was triggered by the missing person premise. Unfortunately, it hits too close to home to be able to read this book with any sort of enjoyment.

I received a free copy from NetGalley. I hope it was just reading it on a kindle, but trying to figure out which world was being talked about was sometimes confusing. Two groups of young teen friends and their lives come together through letters sent between worlds. Both main characters, one from each world, are dealing with a missing person in their life, in both cases their fathers. Slow moving and not engaging enough to go looking for the next book in the series. The idea of attacking colors was intriguing though.

I am sorry, I was unable to finish and review this title. Leaving a neutral 3 star rating as this may be a better fit for a different reader.

I was unable to read and review this book before it was archived. I have purchased my own copy for future reading. Any future review will be posted on my blog and Goodreads.

I lost interest in this book and did not read it so I cannot write a review. Nonetheless, thank you for the chance to review this book.

I read this back in March, right before my life fell apart, and fortunately wrote most of the below at the time. I’m finally playing catch-up now, so:

I swore I wouldn’t request any more books from Netgalley for a while, and I had a lot in queue in front of this book – but I couldn’t help it. Having finished something wonderful (a Dorothy L. Sayers), I sifted through all the books that have been sitting neglected on the Kindle, and opened something new from Netgalley instead.

I don’t know how much sense this will make, but for some reason <I>A Corner of White</i> felt like a book written in the present tense. It’s not; there’s nothing so gimmicky about the writing: alternating third person points of view, switching back and forth between Madeleine here in the World (in Cambridge, England) and Elliott in Cello, a different world altogether. Maybe it was the immediacy of the writing that felt like present-tense, or the first lines, chatty as they are: “Madeleine Tully turned fourteen yesterday, but today she did not turn anything.

“Oh, wait. She turned a page.”

It’s a swiftly flowing story, about Madeleine finding a note tucked into an out-of-order parking meter (and a good thing too that the London traffic department is in this universe so lax about fixing out-of-order meters), and replying, and of her reply being found on the other side of a crack between worlds by Elliott Baranski, in the back of a broken tv which has been incorporated into a sculpture. It makes sense, trust me. It’s all about perception – Madeleine’s perception of Elliott, and vice versa, and also how both of them see their own worlds and their own lives. Both their fathers are missing from their lives, and the reasons for that which everyone around them keeps assuring them are true may not be correct.

One of the only things keeping me from a five-star rating for A Corner of White is a huge gaffe that I can only hope was/will be caught in a final edit before publication. The small stuff – botched punctuation and formatting and such – is, as has often been said, par for the course, and this was after all an “uncorrected proof”, so lamentable as it is it doesn’t count toward the rating. But the mention – a couple of times – of the “original” colors consisting of red, blue, and green … That was not good. Primary and secondary and complementary colors are something I learned about in my first months of art school. That is, I’m sure I knew the basics before that, but it was well and truly drilled into our heads early on, being, I think it’s obvious, rather important. Since green is made of blue and yellow …

A useful trick to remembering complementary colors was to think of them as holidays – red and green, Christmas; blue and orange, Halloween (blue standing in for black to make it work), and (vitally, for Elliott) yellow and purple, Easter. Just putting that out there.

Apart from that, it was wonderfully enjoyable. And they’ll fix that, right? Right?