Seventeen-year-old Ryan Poitier Sharp is a daredevil whose passion is skydiving at her father’s diving school, living life on the edge with confidence and wild abandon on and high above the Mojave Desert. Daughter of a vibrant Caribbean mother, a veteran father with PTSD, she is also blessed with a Caribbean grandmother who has shamanistic Obeah (voodoo) magic in her loving bones. Ryan fully inhabits her ‘rum and clouds’ skin, glorious curls and careless beauty in reckless ways without apology, making love to her sweetheart, Dom, and caring deeply for her gay friend, Joe. However, when suddenly thwarted by her father in her wish to make a dangerous group dive, she takes LSD at a party and everything about her changes, mysteriously and for the worse. How she and her loved ones deal with Ryan’s frightening change, trying to discover the roots of her new darkness, makes up the body of the book, which is definitely for older young adults, since it has explicit sex scenes, descriptions of self-harm, suicidal struggles and family tragedies brought on by hallucinations. Tracy Clark has explored an unusual theme in Mirage, taking a metaphysical journey through what is either devastating mental illness or a ghostly possession understood only by Ryan’s heroic shaman Grandmother, who teaches her to reclaim her being, soul and sanity by bravely singing ‘the song of her life.’