“That’s odd,” Owen’s mother said, raising one eyebrow. I can’t imagine it’ll affect your life too much.”

Basically, your imagination doesn’t exist anymore. “You’ve lost the ability to visualize anything in your head. “The technical term for what’s happening to you is aphantasia,” the doctor said. “I can’t picture it,” he said, wondering why he didn’t feel more frustrated.

Owen shut his eyes again, knowing he could do this. He could see it clearly, right there in front of him. He opened his eyes again, a bit confused, and stared harder at the photo. He could remember words describing the dog, like “dalmatian,” “spotted,” “tail,” and “paws,” but for whatever reason, he couldn’t build an image using those words. But once his eyes closed, he frowned, realizing he couldn’t bring an image of the dog into his mind. “Now close your eyes and try to picture this dog in your head,” he instructed Owen. Eventually the doctor pulled out a picture of a dog-a spotted dalmatian-and showed it to him. Owen sat patiently while the doctor rummaged through some files in a folder. In this final installment of the genre-bending Story Thieves series, Owen and Bethany will be forced to risk everything to defeat Nobody and save multiple realities. Then Owen gets trapped in a dark, dystopian reality five years in the future, where nothing is needed more desperately than the power to imagine.įictional Bethany is thrilled to be training with her father as his new sidekick, Twilight Girl-until she realizes that the fictional reality will fade away completely without the nonfictional world to hold it together.

Owen-and every other nonfictional person-have lost their imaginations, so they can’t picture their lives any differently. Bethany has been split in two, with her fictional and nonfictional selves living in the separate realms.īut weirdly, no one seems to mind. The villain they have come to know as Nobody has ripped asunder the fictional and nonfictional worlds, destroying their connection. Owen and Bethany try to find their way back to each other after the fictional and nonfictional worlds are torn apart in this fifth and final book in the New York Times bestselling series, Story Thieves -which was called a “fast-paced, action-packed tale” by School Library Journal-from the author of the Half Upon a Time trilogy.īethany and Owen have failed.

Worlds apart james riley