Still

Title: Still

Author: Camilla Monk

Genre: Adult Fantasy

Rating: Five Stars!

On a whim, twenty-year-old Emma books a vacation to Rome, intent on finding her absent father, who she hasn’t seen since one-long-ago day on Coney Island. It really isn’t the best time in her life to pick up and travel halfway across the world, especially because Emma has a unique problem — she can stop time — so she’s a bit leery of traveling. She’s never been able to control her ability and worries about what could happen if time stops while she’s overseas. Despite her fears though, she goes ahead with her vacation, deciding that if she never works up the courage to confront her father, she’ll still make the most of her trip anyway.

Rome is everything she imagines it to be: touristy, ancient, and full of old stuff. It’s nice though, and just as she starts to get excited about her newfound journey, she unexpectedly bumps into her stepsister. It’s a bit of a shocker, really, since she hasn’t seen Lily in years — the last time, in fact, was when Emma had left everything and everyone behind to start her own life. Of course, Lily was the perfect daughter in all the ways Emma could never be, so there’s some resentment there, but Lily has always been kind to Emma and she seems genuinely thrilled to see her, so Emma does the unthinkable: she accepts Lily’s invitation to be her tour guide.

As they make their way across the city, Emma learns that her stepsister works for Katharos, a prestigious archeological foundation that has just located an ancient stone table near the Coliseum. Emma isn’t usually into mythology, but she’s inexplicably drawn to the mysterious artifact even though it gives off some pretty weird vibes and her stepsister’s coworkers and her ken-doll boyfriend are definitely interesting — and not in a good way. To top that all off, there’s this enigmatic, blind hobo who keeps popping up wherever Emma goes. Initially, she thinks it’s just an unfortunate happenstance, but when Faust, the friendly neighborhood bum, starts spouting off cryptic warnings to Emma about Katharos, she starts to think that maybe his presence isn’t so coincidental after all.

Then time stops. People freeze in place and birds hang motionless in the sky, but somehow, something is different this time. Somehow, Emma knows that she isn’t alone in her frozen world anymore and that her spur-of-moment vacation had really been planned a long time ago, because she’s destined to be a part of something far greater than she could have ever imagined.

Still is an exceptionally written and riveting story about a girl who is looking to find her place in life. Emma is lost and broken, but she has a toughness that is both endearing and gritty. She curses entirely too much, but her wit and vulnerabilities are so captivating that readers will instantly overlook all of her flaws and root for her as she finds her true place within the pantheon of the gods.