Two years have passed since Janie Scott, her parents, and her friend Pip drank the Wine of Lethe and forgot all about three weeks of their lives, in which they met Benjamin Burrows and travelled to Nova Zembla to halt an atomic bomb test. After drugging Janie, Mr. and Mrs. Scott, Pip, and a couple of troublesome employees of Scotland Yard, Benjamin and his father escape on a train--it's not safe for Janie and Pip and people close to them to have any memory of the last three weeks, and Benjamin and Mr. Burrows cannot stay in England. But a year after they left, Benjamin sent Janie her diary, and everything came back...
Now Janie is living back in the USA, in a little town called Grayson, New Hampshire, with her parents living in Michigan, writing for television. Janie goes to a private school, Grayson Academy, and rooms with a very rich, stunningly gorgeous (as in, more beautiful than Sarah Pennington from The Apothecary) girl named Opal Magnusson, whose mother is a Malaysian princess. Janie's been working on an experiment in her spare time--inspired by Jin Lo's desalinating solution, she's attempting to recreate the mixture. Much to her annoyance, Mr. Magnusson, Opal's father, keeps praising her intelligence at the expense of Opal. Out of habit, he slights his daughter and calls her stupid and lazy. Janie's not exactly moody Opal's friend, but she can't stand the way Magnusson talks about the two girls, contrasting them unfairly. One awkward restaurant dinner turns into a fight between the two schoolgirls, and the next day, Janie receives shocking news: She has been accused of cheating on a math test--something she would never, ever do--and is now expelled from Grayson Academy. It doesn't take her long to figure out that Opal is the source of the accusation, and a little more digging brings up further revelations. She asks if she can keep working on her chemistry experiment, since she's so close to figuring out the correct solution. The headmaster refuses to let her stay on the campus, and so she ends up working as a dishwasher for Bruno's Italian restaurant, looking over Benjamin's rather strange letters in her spare time, and befriending Bruno's son Rafaello.
Meanwhile, Benjamin has been sending Janie coded messages with his location hidden in the code. It's been a while since he and his father travelled, though, and instead of running around the world stopping atomic testing as they're supposed to be doing, they've been acting as field medics for Vietnamese villagers fighting the Vietminh. He, too, has his own chemistry experiment going, but this one is more in the vein of the Pharmacopoeia and is slightly less scientific. His goal is to create a substance that can provide windows into the worlds of others. He ends up with a gray powder that allows you to look through the eyes of anyone else who has taken it. All you have to do is think of them, and their world will open up before you. He sends some to Janie, and their secret communication begins. But some things are private, and Benjamin ends up seeing an event that Janie would wish unknown to the world.
We can't forget about Pip. The former pickpocket has slid easily into celebrity life, even though he had a painful breakup with Sarah Pennington at some point between The Apothecary and The Apprentices that still hurts him and won't get out of his mind. His comfortable new life is disrupted by an unexpected telegram from Benjamin--Janie's in danger, he says. Get to America, he says. Pip immediately sails off, battling uncomfortable shoes and creepy girls along the way. His arrival in America brings unpleasant surprises.
Unfortunately, like in her previous book, Meloy hasn't seemed to come up with interesting dialogue tags. There's still a profusion of "said" for statements and "asked" for questions. Maybe she's going for a certain tone; I don't know. The other thing that I found weird with The Apprentices was the choice of point of view. The Apothecary was written in first person from Janie's POV, and I found the transition between that and the four-character, third-person style of The Apprentices very awkward and jarring. I got used to it after a while, but the sound of Janie's voice in first person had sounded so normal in my head that suddenly reading her from a less personal point of view alongside a few other characters didn't feel right for almost the whole book.
There's just one thing that I wonder--The Apprentices has an epilogue to close out this story, but I still feel like something's missing. Besides, the epilogue was weird--it left Janie and Benjamin sitting in a theatre at the end of the last chapter, and picked up with the islanders, basically giving an omniscient summary of what happened with the whole John Frum thing, and how Tessel and Efa returned to their home. The tone was very different from the rest of the book, and it just felt like such an odd way to end the whole story. Maybe Meloy intends to return to these books' world.
In short, I would recommend this book to anyone who read The Apothecary, liked it, and wants to read more about Janie, Benjamin, and Pip. It's another successful work by Maile Meloy, and I do wonder if there's more to come in this particular story.