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There’s more than a little magic in Phoenix author Mindy Tarquini’s second novel, The Infinite Now (SparkPress, $16.95). Instead of wizards and vampires, it’s populated by an enchanted curtain, a spooky medicine woman and a fortune-teller’s daughter caught between tradition and modernity in flu-ravaged 1918 Philadelphia. After 16-year-old Fiora Vicente is orphaned by the epidemic, she accidentally casts her neighborhood into a static bubble of time in which nothing progresses – an unyielding, never-ending world of Now. As the bubble expands, the tempestuous Fiora must make peace with her past and accept the future before it’s too late. Tarquini’s entrancing fever dream of a novel isn’t marketed as a young adult title, but its angst quotient places it comfortably in that realm.
