The Side Ways
A brief synopsis of The Side Ways, Book One.
[Warning: vague spoilers]
The Side Ways is a 3-book urban fantasy series that centers around Kendra White, a girl whose parents belonged to a world that exists alongside our own. A world of seven separate Domains, peopled by “Reckoners,” some thousands of years old, who gain Ways of power from specific, dedicated perspectives.
Raised as an outsider – a “Mundane” – Kendra tries to make sense of a realm where every observation, decision and ability depends on one’s viewpoints and perceptions. What is fundamental to a Reckoner of Sight may be unimportant or even dangerous to those from Earth, Blood, Release, Increase, Flux and Chaos. And though awakened to the Domains, Kendra is still outside them; she does not belong to any of the related Seven Houses.
In her struggle to understand their history and tensions, she becomes an inadvertent piece in a power game some six-thousand years in the playing. A game whose last round ended with the Great Flood that nearly wiped the world clean of both Reckoners and Mundanes.
In the first book, "Awake," Kendra enters the world of the Domains but struggles to understand the people and powers she encounters there. She is a very rare creature in two senses; she is the daughter of two Houses – Release and Increase – and she was raised outside the knowledge of the Domains. She is unaffiliated, and this is not only confusing for her, but dangerous.
Most Reckoners grow up within a Domain where life, the world and access to powerful, supernatural Ways depend on your House’s perspective. In addition, the Law that guides interaction between the Houses does not apply to outsiders. Two strange events in one day – an odd and frightening Rorschach test and a dangerous encounter in the topiary garden she helps care for – bring her to partial awareness of the Domains. But she is still an outsider and does not yet completely accept that these events aren’t just elements of her imagination.
Brought to Solomon Monday, the Librarian and Master of Sight, she is given a deadly test that will either fully awaken her Reckoning, or be her death...