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Saving Lucas Biggs, by Marisa de los Santos and David Teague (HarperCollins, middle grade, April 29, 2014), opens with an innocent man being sentenced to death. Margaret's father was a whistle-blower, a geologist who publicly decried the fracking that was poisoning the water of Victory. He was accused of murder and arson, and Judge Biggs, a company man through and through, had no qualms whatsoever condemning him.
Margaret and most everyone else in town knows that the mining company is corrupt and vicious and that Judge Biggs was complicit in the plot to frame her father. But Judge Biggs wasn't always the hateful corporate toady he became--he was once a good-hearted boy, back in the Liberty of 1938, the year when the miners, driven to desperation by unsafe working conditions and pathetic wages tied to to the company story, took a stand against the company and went on strike, using non-violent protest to press for change. It didn't work; two innocent men died, and the life of young Lucas was warped horribly out of true. But in present day liberty, there's one man, Joshua (the grandfather of Margaret's best friend, Charlie) who remembers Lucas Biggs back before things went wrong. And Joshua still has faith that his old friend can still be saved.....
The story of Joshua's life in 1938, alternating with Margaret's in the present, tells of all the suffering of the minors' families, and the heartbreak of how close things got to a peaceful resolution. Listening to Joshua talk of his old friend, and how he changed, it becomes clear to Margaret that the only way to save her father is to save Lucas Biggs.
And Margaret thinks she might be able to do this, for her family can time travel. So she goes back to 1938, and pushes against the weight of history, as she tries, with young Joshua's help, to keep the innocent from being killed.
Saving Lucas Biggs has memorable characters, an intriguing premise in which details keep getting added to the story back in the past making it kind of like a mystery, and there is tons of truly heart-touching emotion and shoulder-clenching suspense (shoulder-clenching because that's what happens when you read about it).
The time travelling came some ways into the book, but it was satisfying time travelling--the authors did a fine job of sending her back in time with her mission front and center, and, along with Margaret herself, they refused to get distracted by things irrelevant to the matter at hand.
In short, I can imagine lots of kids enjoying it lots as an exciting adventure story combining past and present danger.
On the more critical side, the actual manner in which the all is resolved did not strike me as convincing; it was pretty much
deus ex machina, and its lack of emotional and narrative heft
But what I really want to say is Yes! for a book that tackles corporate greed and corruption and puts it in historical context! Yes for a book that uses a kid friendly premise and story to show the atrocities committed by the ruthless companies! (The atrocities are described--people, just sitting in the tent camp, are gunned down, and are killed and mutilated--but they are described in a factual, un-hysterical way that makes it possible to move through the horror without nightmares). And Yes for a book that advocates for non-violent resistance inspired by Quakerism!
Maybe it's not, you know,
subtle, and the ultimate ease of the ending did kind of disappoint me more than somewhat, but still, how can I not say yes to a book that combines such powerful points with an engaging story?
My response was quite possible colored by the fact that I read this morning (while finishing the book),
this piece of news:"North Carolina legislators are considering a bill that would make it a crime to publicly disclose toxic chemicals that energy companies use in the hydraulic fracturing process, with offenders on the hook for fines or even jail time." It seems like even medical and emergency personal couldn't talk about the toxic chemicals used in fracking even if they were directly copying with their repercussions.
How can this be?
If you enjoy romantic time travel, written for the YA reader, you may well enjoy
Kissing Shakespeare, by Pamela Mingle (Delacorte, 2012) . If, perhaps, you ask for a tad more than time travel back into a love triangle of sorts, such as political/religious tangles of plot, you will get that tad more. But if you ask for a lot more...not so much.
Miranda is a young actress, very much conflicted about the whole acting thing because she is the daughter of famous Shakespearian actors. Stephan is a young Elizabethan gentleman, with the ability to travel through time, who has arrived in the present, started watching tv to gain an appreciation of cultural norms, and insinuated himself into the play that Mrianda's currently starring in (The Taming of the Shrew). Stephan is pretty sure (based on the shows he's watched) that modern teens throw themselves into bed with each other with delighted abandon, and he's reasonable sure that Miranda won't mind travelling back into the past with him so that she can seduce Shakespeare. She does, rather a lot, especially because (with excellent reason) she is furious that Stephan considers her a wanton wench.
(Teenaged Shakespeare is in danger of become a Jesuit, which is convincingly possible as things are presented here. Being seduced, Stephan assumes, will make him less likely to leave the world and it's pleasures behind....and the world won't loose his plays, which would, Stephan's visions inform him, be catastrophic).
So there's Miranda, back in the past acting the role of Stephan's sister, and rather conflicted about loosing her virginity to Shakespeare (assuming the seduction works).
And there are a bunch of secondary characters, very much concerned with religion (because many of them are staunch Catholics, which was not as safe as may be under Elizabeth I).
And there is Stephan, to whom Miranda is drawn with passionate intensity....and who is not, in his turn, undrawn to her....
And there's young Shakespeare...working on the first draft of Taming of the Shrew while contemplating religion....
And there are the hunters of Catholics, ready to burn them at the stake etc., closing in on the manor house where all this is happening....
And there are Stephan and Miranda, kissing...and Shakespeare and Miranda, kissing....and Miranda wanting Stephan to kiss her more... (while still Stephan wants Miranda to jump into bed with Shakespeare, which was icky).
Like I said, you have to enjoy romantic time travel to really like this one, and it wasn't quite enough for me, especially since the romance was tinged with ick. On top of that, my reading experience was rather spoiled by a historical error-- in 1581 you can't pass off a befuddled girl as a servant recently come from the New World. And so, perforce, I distrusted the historical accuracy of the book from that point on, and though, apart from a reference to leprosy being a thing of the past in England (which, Wikipedia informs me, it wasn't until two centuries later) I didn't find any thing else that seemed wrong, I never shook off my suspicions. I was not soothed by Miranda either--although apparently she did a just marvelous job passing herself off as an Elizabethan, I wasn't convinced.
I was glad when the religious element of the plot (Catholics vs Protestants) pushed itself to the forefront of the story about halfway through -- it made a rather slow-moving story more interesting. And there was the added thought-provoking thread of the role of women in Elizabethan England. On the down side, Shakespeare himself barely added any interest--I can't remember him saying anything at all Shakespearean, which was a disappointment.
In any event, read this if you want a bit of historically tangled romance, but not if you want a really satisfying time travel story.
However, you don't have to take my word for it:
School Library Journal, August 2012:
"This novel is definitely a cut above the typical teen romance. A delightful story about star-crossed, time-traveling lovers."
Booklist, September 15, 2012:
"Mingle remains true to the history and events of the era, thus revealing the challenge of living in a time of religious persecution and suppression of women."
Sometimes a reader just has to ask "does the sentient dinosaur boy actually add anything to the story?" In the case of
Ancient Fire (Danger Boy, book 1), by Mark London Williams (2001), I'm happy to say that he does. But before we meet this particular sentient dinosaur from an alternate reality, a lot of other things have to happen.
It is 2019. Physics has advanced, to the point that two scientists, husband and wife, have made a breakthrough that may allow time travel to be a workable proposition. A secret government agency is very interested indeed in the ramifications of this...and its agents have invaded the lab where the research is being carried out, and are pushing the experiments to dangerous levels. So much so that the female scientist disappears, as it were, in a puff of (metaphoric) time smoke. Her husband, desperate to escape from government control, flees across country with their son, Eli, but the government agents track them, and force the work to continue. And when Eli incautiously interferes with an experiment, he becomes unlocked in time himself!
In the meantime, a young saurian lad is headed out on a mission to an alternate earth, because this is what all young saurians do in middle school. The physics of his journey collides with Eli's first rush through time, and they find themselves in ancient Alexandria, just in time to be attacked by an angry mob. There they meet Thea, daughter of Hypatia, librarian of Alexandria. After some bouncing in time/near death at the hands of angry mob/manipulation by government agents/the revelation that Eli's mom might be alive in the 1930s/a plague that might have been brought from the past/an angry rhino, the book ends....with lots more story left to be told!
Basically, the sentient dinosaur boy, Clyne, made the book for me. Without him, it would be generic science-driven time travel for the young; with him, there's lovely cross-cultural exploration, with bonus surrealism. He's the most engaging character, qua character, as well--perhaps because Eli and Thea are both in such unhappy and anxious states that they don't add much lightness to story (Clyne's major worry, until he's in mortal peril himself, is the grade he's going get), but mostly because he's such a pleasant, inquisitive, optimistic sentient dinosaur that I liked him lots.
The book also offers a nice introduction to the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, for those anxious to learn about the past (harrowing, though, to watch the scrolls go up in smoke), and for those who are physics geeks, doubtless the science of nanoparticles and the nature of time and space will provide interesting fodder for critical thought.
I enjoyed this one a lot more than I though I was going to. It is the first of a series (Danger Boy), and for Clyne's sake I'll actively look for the next book,
Dragon Sword--even though the introduction of Arthur and Merlin as allies sends up even more red flags that sentient dinosaurs do! Try this one on the imaginatively adventurous nine or ten year old who enjoys a swirl of complicated plot, sooner rather than later, because 2019 is almost here....and although the book is not that dated yet, physics keeps getting stranger in real life....
(The only other sentient saurian character I can think of is the one in Sherri Tepper's
Gibbon's Decline and Fall, which I've whited out the title of because it is a spoiler. And I didn't mind it there either, so maybe I am more open-minded viz dinosaurs than I think I am. I still have no desire to read Anne McCaffery's
Dinosaur Planet books though).
At first glance,
In the Keep of Time, by Margaret J. Anderson (1977) seems like a standard time travel story--four siblings, unwillingly spending the summer with a great aunt in the Scottish boarderlands, explore the ruined castle nearby. Their aunt is its chatelaine, and has given them the key to the tower...and when they turn it (after it starts glowing, the way magic keys do), they travel back in time to the 15th century. But soon a twist appears--the youngest child, Olivia, has no memory of her contemporary self. Instead, she is Mae, grand-daughter of the castle's lord, with a family who loves her, and absolutely no inclination to trust her three siblings.
And to make things even more exciting, the castle is besieged by an English army, and its own fighting men are away on a cattle raid. Andrew, with Mae as his guide, is sent to warn them (exciting adventure in the past bit happens, including a battle between James II of Scotland and the English).
But for me, things really picked up when the three older kids drag Mae/Olivia back into the present with them. They had expected her to become Olivia once more, but to their consternation, she remains Mae. Child of the middle-ages that she now is, she is terrified and wonder struck in turn by the marvels of the present. And her siblings, seeing no other recourse, desperately work to make Mae into a child of the 20th century who their parents might not realize is someone who misses her "real" mother back in the past....In the process, the siblings come to appreciate each other more (which was something their parents were hoping to accomplish by sending them off together for the summer).
Then the key glows again...and the kids head back to the keep. Once more they travel through time, but now they find themselves several centuries in the future, and this might be the earliest example in a children's book of a future that imagines the consequences of sea-level rise from global warming caused by over-reliance on technology. The only inhabitant of the keep in this time period is an old, mysterious woman....who is able (off-stage) to return Olivia to herself (at least, enough so that she isn't Mae anymore....).
This book is the sort to knock the socks off the nine or ten year old who's never read a time travel book, the sort of book they might well remember for life. It's one that is best read as young as possible, though...I found it a pleasant read, but certainly it was not as emotionally powerful as it would have been to a younger me, whose relationships with siblings and parents were of primary importance.
I had read Margaret J. Anderson's
Searching for Shona, but had not realized she'd written time travel books, two of which appear to be connected to this one. I'll be looking out for them!
The Ninja Librarians: The Accidental Keyhand, by Jen Swann Downey (Sourcebooks Jaberwocky, April 2014, middle grade) is a zesty romp of a read that I thoroughly enjoyed; really truly thoroughly enjoyed. Stripped to its barest bones, the plot might seem an old chestnut, but here the old bones are made fresh and new. To wit:
Old Bone 1: There is a secret society of time travellers trying to set history "right" and a bad society working against them.
But these time travellers are librarians (aka Lybrarians)! Who combine mad shelving skills with mad sword fighting skills! And who live in Petrarch's library where it's all a lovely geek and combat fest for both the residents and the reader, a place where books and scrolls are combined with swords and axes, and beautiful peaceful outdoor places and architecture of many times, and tasty snacks (which appear when magically "read" from books. (Not everyone can read snacks into material things; some can, for instance, make extinct auroches materialize).
And the Lybrarians mission of setting things right is focused on the preservation of knowledge and valuable writings! They head back in time on dangerous missions to save books!
Viz the bad society--they remain on the periphery for most of the book, which was fine with me because there was enough internal tension without dragging Good vs Evil into it. And after all, epic confrontations don't have to happen every day.
Old Bone 2: two kids from our time stumble into the secret society and find out they are special. They make friends and enemies. An alpha girl hates the girl main character. The boy main character gets a crush on a pretty girl.
Well, yes, Dorrie and her older brother Marcus do fall into a Magical World, and they are kind of special. They've opened a portal to our time, and are therefore the "keyhands" who can open it for others to travel through, and keyhands are a rather special type of librarian.
But no, Dorrie and Marcus aren't all that special, and the fact that they are keyhands actually irks many people rather a lot, and other people don't trust them, and they aren't particular ept at anything of particular value. Dorrie, for instance, is a sword-fighter, but finds to her chagrin that the standards of 21st-century amature re-enactors are horribly low...
Despite their lack of obvious talents, Dorrie and Marcus get to make places for themselves at the library, grow up a bit, appreciate books more, and start acquiring useful fighting/stealth/ninja skills--which they have to put to the test at the end of the book when things get truly dicey. (Dorrie gets lessons in sword fighting from Cyrano de Bergerac!)
Moving on to other lines of thought:--The library, as seen in this book, is rather focused on European civilization (I hope gets broadened in subsequent books), but there are Lybrarians and apprentices from places besides Europe, including Dorrie's new best friend Ebba, whose parents are from Mali, and who almost (but not quite) gets enough page time to be a main character.
--Time travel
qua time travel is the heart of the plot (people going back to deliberately change the past), but the lived experience of travelling into different times isn't important to this particular story (and it's time travel made easy with translation magic and wardrobe help). That being said, the story does end with an emotional zing that's dependent on time travel....
Final thoughts:The whole set up of the library is just FUN as all get out, and the story zips along just beautifully. And though I kind of suspected a key plot twist, this in no way reduced my enjoyment.
Best of all in my mind (given the number of books that I have put aside in the past month) I was never once kicked out of the story because of the writing. Which means that either the plot was so fun I didn't notice infelicities, or the writing was very good, or, quite possibly, both. I think this is my favorite middle grade fantasy of the year so far, and I look forward to more!
Smasher, by Scott Bly (Blue Sky Press, March, 2014, middle grade)
The future is in jeopardy--a madman who has managed to combine incredible technology with the psychic energies of nature (the Hum) is about to enslave mankind by with an infections cocktail of computer code and manipulated DNA. In the 16th century, a boy named Charlie can manipulate the hum even more wonderfully than the madman in the future. And Charlie's ability to solve puzzles has been honed to a razors edge by his grandfather, and his survival instincts have been honed to a razors edge by fear of bullies and inquisitors....
Travelling between the two times is a girl named Geneva, a robot with miraculous powers of her own. She comes to get Charlie, and take him to the future, where the two will stand together as last hope for humanity. (There's a dog too, a very nice indeed puppy with enhancements of her own....there's also an enhanced gorilla, which you don't see that often, but he plays a relatively minor role).
And there's plenty of action, as the bad guy and his minions try to hunt down Charlie and Geneva, and they try to escape while foiling.
It was an enjoyable read, and it's a very good introduction to that fine speculative fiction question of how human a robot can be. I liked Geneva very much! Charlie was fine too, but with a relatively straightforward, what you see is what you get, character. Geneva comes with Mysteries and Questions.
This is one I'm happy to recommend to kids of ten and eleven or so, moving into sci fi action books. It offers a nice serving of age-appropriate violence, which is to say there are deaths, and torture, but not disturbingly graphic, and balanced by a lot of sewer-related discomfort. (Even if a kid's read The Hunger Games and Ender's Game already, I don't think there's any reason to hurry toward ever more violence.) However, there is considerable cruelty toward animals, which the bad guy is manipulating in his lab of evil--this could well cause distress!
The action is balanced by dashes of (not tremendously subtle) philosophy about good vs evil, and by the friendship between Geneva and Charlie, which was a pleasure to read about. And I think the time travel element will appeal to that audience as well--there's a friendliness to a protagonist who's plunked, like the reader, into a strange and alien landscape where much is confusing at first.
That being said, I myself found the time slip element unsatisfactory. There's not a lot of time spent in the 16th century, and were it not for the fact that we are told the year is 1542, there's really no way to know. Likewise, I felt Charlie's easy acceptance of the future somewhat unconvincing. (It's also hard for me not to care about details like names--as I know the name Charles hadn't made it across the English Channel yet....and how can a boy living in a remote mountain village have three tutors, unless he's the aristocracy, which he doesn't seem to be?).
I also wasn't quite satisfied with the back story--when I'm told right at the beginning of the book that the protagonist's harsh grandfather has blood on his hands, and is apparently a murderer, I expect this to be explained, if not resolved, clearly and with conviction, and (even though I read fast I don't think I missed anything) the details stayed pretty murky.
But I don't think my two issues are the sort that will affect the reading pleasure of the target audience, especially the target audience for fast-paced sci-fi excitement. Especially recommended for the computer geek kid-coding plays a bit part in the story!
Here's
the Kirkus review.
Disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher
I love the premise of
Echo, by Alicia Wright Brewster (Dragonfairy Press, YA, April 2013). On an alien planet, settled by two waves of colonization from Earth, the apocalypse has been foretold. But the council, whose members can control the elements with their minds, is determined to prevent it. And they are willing to keep trying, even when things don't work out--they simply turn back the clock, rewinding time to give themselves another chance.
When Echo begins, it is the fifth rewind. The council has tried four times already to avert a disaster whose very nature they were at first uncertain of--and with each rewind, they've gained more information. And they've determined that what they need this time around is a teenaged girl named Ashara Vine. This comes as something of a huge, mind-blowing surprise to Ashara, who had no idea that she was one of the very few with the ability to manipulate the ether itself. And it comes as an additional surprise that the man chosen by the council to train her and a small cohort of other young manipulators is her ex-boyfriend, Loken.
Tension builds as Ashara learns about her powers, and the nature of the threat menacing her planet...and builds as she and Loken rekindle their relationship....and builds still more as information from the previous rewinds is revealed, and plots and machinations within the council, and within her world's society, make it more than somewhat uncertain if this time around, the world will be saved.
Do not, however, expect that because this story takes place on an alien world, it is truly science fiction. The world building is not such that I felt I was on a different planet, despite the two suns, and the powers of the elemental manipulators read like fantasy.
Do expect that the romance between Ashara and Loken will sometimes overshadow the end-of-the-world plot, sometimes so much so that I was annoyed (there are times when passionate is appropriate, and times when it is really not to the point). I would recommend this one to those who like romance books that happen to be speculative fiction, rather than to speculative fiction fans who happen to like a bit of romance.
If you enjoy reading about groups of teenagers being trained together to fight with magical powers, you will enjoy that part of the book. However, if your mind follows more or less the same trains of thought as mine, you too might find it odd that the fact that there's a coming apocalypse is broadcast to all and sundry, causing rather pointless stress (there's no escaping the countdown clocks). And you might agree with me that the nature of the threat is ultimately rather unconvincing.
All in all, it's not possible for me to recommend the book wholeheartedly. However, I did truly like the premise of time travel being used to figure out how to avert catastrophe, and the interesting ramifications thereof! And your millage may totally vary; here are some other reviews:
KirkusApocalypse MamaAll In One PlaceThe Urban Paranormal Book BlogFinal note: this is one for
my multicultural book list--Ashara's father is of African descent, which is made beautifully clear in the front cover picture of Ashara!
The People In Pineapple Place, by Anne Lindbergh (1982)
Ten year old August did not want to move with his mother from the countryside of Vermont to Georgetown in Washington, D.C. He did not want his parents to get divorced, and his mother to work full time. And he does not want to wait for the college kid looking after him to get off the phone so as to take him outside.
So off he goes, sad and angry, into the streets, and finds a cobblestone alley called Pineapple Place, where six old house are home to a bunch of kids who seem like they could be new friends for him. But though the kids, especially April, do become his friends, it quickly becomes apparent that Pineapple Place is rather...unusual.
It is not a spoiler to explain why, because it comes up quite close to the beginning of the story, and is the whole basic point of the point.
Back in the 1930s, a Pineapple Place resident decided that Baltimore was not the best place to be, and started moving all six houses around the country. And although the residents can leave their homes and venture into the new places they visit, only one of them can be seen and heard by the locals. And none of them have aged a day since Pineapple Place started its hoping.
Strangely, August can see them all....and the last days of his summer vacation become a bit of a mad-hatter series of excursions around the city- playing with invisible kids leads to wacky situations. And this is fun to read about, although it's a tad stressful that August's mother thinks for much of the book that he's making it all up.
But the fact that the Pineapple Place folk don't age gradually started casting a pall of horror over it all...especially when April's mother talks of how she had hoped to go back to college, and not spend her days pie-making (which is now her fate for eternity....). It reminded me very much of
Tuck Everlasting, but without the clear acknowledgement on the author's part that immortality is a bitter fate. Especially when you can't even interact with new people anymore because of being invisible.
However, the invisibility is alleviated somewhat by the fact that Pineapple Place revisits the 1930s on a regular basis to allow for grocery shopping, as the residents can be seen in their time of origin. At one point, they take August with him, and he gets to sight see in the past. This is the part that makes it time travel.
The book must be read with enough grains of salt to kill a thousand slugs. Why, for instance, must they scrounge around in trash cans for bits and bobs to use in the present when they are regularly going back to the 1930s for groceries? How are they paying for their groceries? Why are they putting up with the dictator of Pineapple Place who started moving them around in the first place? It really makes little sense. I am very keen now to read the sequel,
The Prisoner of Pineapple Place-- will they escape the madness?
Putting that issue aside, though, it's a fun and rather heart-warming story. The friendship between August and April is
nice, the adventures fun, and the premise certainly is thought provoking. I imagine that the target audience of 8-10 year olds will be a lot less bothered by it than me, and will probably find it truly magical.
(They will probably all have read
Wonder, too, and so the name "August" will be like an old friend. I wonder if we will see an uptick in its popularity 15 years from now...).
This review of
Yesterday, by C.K. Kelly Martin (Random House, YA, 2012), is something of a spoiler by necessity--I am, after all, reviewing it for Timeslip Tuesday. But the time travel element is pretty obvious, so I don't feel dreadfully bad.
In the world of 2063, shredded by environmental catastrophe, the rich and powerful still manage to live a comfortable life full of virtual enjoyment. 16-year-old Freya is one of these lucky ones...until her life implodes when her brother falls victim to a new and deadly plague.
In 1985, a girl named Freya has just moved back to Canada after her father's death in New Zealand. Grief and the culture shock of starting at a new school in a new country are enough to make anyone feel that life is vaguely unreal, but for Freya, this feeling is not diminishing with time as it should. Her memories all feel distant and shallow, and nothing seems right. And at night, the dreams come, full of vivid horror....
And then she encounters Garren, boy who she thinks, or rather, knows, she once was close too. Even though he has no clue who she is, she knows there is some link between them.
Turns out, Freya is right, and there were secrets back in 2063 that changed the course of her life, and Garren's too. And there are people in 1985 who will do whatever it takes for that course, now that it is set, to remain unchanged. With Freya, and then Garren, remembering their real past lives in the future, they are both in danger.
Yesterday is a slow build-up of suspense-even though it's fairly obvious that the two Freyas are one and the same, Freya's own journey to this realization is a gradually accumulating nightmare. The first half of the book was perhaps a tad too slow--we aren't in any doubt as to Freya's feelings of disconnect because we are told about them plenty--but the whole ensemble works well enough. Those who enjoy suspenseful speculative fiction involving teens on the run from bad guys, falling in love as they struggle to survive, will doubtless enjoy it.
That being said, though this is clearly a time travel book, the time travel is to a certain extent
a deus ex machine that allows the story to exist. Although as Freya recovers her memories (in a truly unsubtle information dump), she is struck by the contrast between the two times in which she has lived, the dislocation between those two lives has been soothed by mind wiping such that there isn't a huge feeling of cultural dislocation (one of my personal favorite elements of time travel). And the explanation for the time-travel came out of left field right at the end, introducing whole new bits of possible plot. Only at the very very very end does the time travel set up produce a real ZING!, which made me a bit sad because that whole story that we don't actually get to read about sounded much more appealing than the story I'd just read....
So I didn't mind reading it, and found the premise interesting, and now that we have gotten the slowish bit of realizing what has happened out of the way I'm rather interested in the sequel,
Tomorrow --but it just wasn't quite the book I'd hoped it would be.
And so at last the story of
the Infinity Ring comes full circle--with
The Iron Empire, we are once more back with James Dashner, who wrote the first book of the series (
A Mutiny in Time). Sera, Dak, and Riq have travelled through the centuries fixing Break after Break--all the bits of history that didn't happen as they should have. Now they have travelled to the time when it all began. It is the age of Alexander the Great, and the time of Aristotle--who founded the league of Hystorians who sent the threesome off on their quest.
The mission seems simple. If Sara, Dak, and Riq can keep Alexander from an untimely death, they will have healed the last break, averted the cataclysm that will otherwise engulf the earth, and they'll get to go home to a better world (except, perhaps, Riq, whose future might have been lost due to the changes in the past*). But to their horror, they find their old nemesis Tilda has gotten to Greece before them....and nothing is going to be easy.
I enjoyed this one quite a bit--perhaps because I knew that Finally there would be an end to all the trials and tribulations and excitements, which, though exiting, had filled the previous books almost to the point of saturation. I liked seeing Aristotle play a real role, and Alexander was rather fun to meet as well. And it did indeed all resolve in a satisfactory way...and although this isn't actually the end of the series, at least there's a bit of a breather!
And in this book, the bickering and tensions between the three kids was diminished--they've come to rely on each other, accept each other, and work as a team. Since I'm the sort of reader who doesn't thrive on interpersonal stress, I appreciated this.
This isn't a series that is deeply educational--although young readers will acquire a few basic facts (such as Aristotle being Alexander's tutor), it's not the sort of time travel that gives a rich and detailed picture of the past (not a complaint, just saying). But for those who love action and adventure given point and zest by time travel, these books should be just right.
Nice detail in the cover art I appreciated: it's not always the white boy (Dak) who's shown front and center in the picture of them that's on every back cover. On this one, it's Riq:
disclaimer: review copy received from Scholastic for review
*When reading this, my little one, already wise to the ways of stereotype, said cynically "Oh, the black kid dies." In case you are worried about this too, he
does not die, but stays with Alexander, renamed Hephaestion.
The Mysterious Manuscript, by Lars Jakobsen (Graphic Universe 2012), is Book 1 of Mortensen's Escapades, a graphic novel series for older middle-grade readers. Mortensen is a young (early twenties type young) time traveler from Denmark, one of a group of secret agents trying to keep history in order, and keep important artifacts in the time in which they belong (this is explained in an one page introduction).
When we meet Mortensen, he is on his way to an assignation with an antiquarian bookseller, who has found a book that should not exist--no book from 16th-century Scotland should include a picture of a bi-plane. So Mortensen time-travels off to Scotland to try to destroy the book....
And ends up crashing around a castle, being thrown in jail, loosing his time travel device, being rescued by a mysterious ally, and taken to the home of a mute young woman (named Blossom, which I am dubious about) who turns out to have been the one who found the plane. It becomes clear that the book with the plane picture is not all that's going to have to be "fixed"-- for one thing, the young woman is now in danger of being burnt as a witch thanks to Mortensen's arrival in her time.
It was an interesting story, plot-wise, and time-travel-wise as well, but I found the action to be just too quick. The characters never had a chance to breath, and the story never had the chance to expand into something truly engrossing. I am left utterly confused about many plot points. It really does not help that the young woman who helps Mortensen and who seems to be the only person who actually knows what's going on can't talk.
So though I almost liked the premise, and the art style was just fine (except for Blossom's fire-engine red lipstick), it didn't quite click for me. My handy 13 year old graphic novel fan had the same feeling (but didn't notice Blossom's lipstick).
I am very sad about the recent, and horribly untimely, death of Australian writer and illustrator Gregory Rogers. I've already featured one of his wordless time-travel picture books (The Hero of Little Street), a book I liked well enough, but today I'm posting about the book I think is his masterpiece, one that is truly a classic, and the one that makes me wish something fierce that Gregory Rogers was still here to give us more --The Boy, the Bear, the Baron, the Bard (Roaring Brook Press, 2004).
In this wordless picture book, a boy kicks his soccer ball into an empty theater, and goes in after it. It is strange, and dark, and abandoned...and utterly fascinating. The boy finds himself in the costume room, and dressed as an Elizabethan actor, he pulls the curtains aside to go out on the stage....and WHOM! He's back in time, Shakespeare himself is tripping over the soccer ball, and the play is ruined.
Now the boy must run through the streets of London, pursued by the furious playwright. He hides behind the cage of a dancing bear...who asks (wordlessly) to be set free...so boy and bear together set off to experience what the city has to offer them. But Shakespeare is nothing if not persistent. Fortunately the cell block off the Tower of London offers a refuge, and there they find another prisoner (the baron of the title) to be released!
Now Baron, Bear, and Boy are on the run together. But all is not lost! Their path takes them right to Queen Elizabeth, and she is charmed...
Shakespeare, however, still wants revenge. And he chases the boy back to where it all began--the empty stage, and so back home again.
It is sweet and lovely and funny and fascinating, and utterly wonderful. The story flows just beautifully, despite being wordless. The artwork is full of detail, full of enthusiasm, and captivating as all get out. It is a book that is a delight to share with children of just about any age. Critical and cynical though I am, I cannot think of anything negative at all to say about it.
Thank you, Gregory Rogers, for making me and my children laugh and learn.
April is such a hard month--all I want to do is to be outside, getting everything weeded and planted and spruced up, but it's the busiest month at work, busy with the kids' homework, busy busy busy...and so no time to read the big long book that was supposed to be this week's Timeslip Tuesday offering.
So I turned to a quick picture book read --
Bonjour, Lonnie, by
Faith Ringgold (Hyperion Books for Children, 1996), and, um, it's kind of strange.
Bonjour, Lonnie, is a picture book that uses rather vague magical bird-assisted time travel in order to show an orphaned boy, Lonnie, his family, and to give him loving guardians in his own time. The magical bird in question is a singing French one, known as Love Bird, and when it visits Lonnie, it takes him back to early 20th-century Paris...and then vanishes, leaving him to wander past famous monuments to look for it (basically three pages of Paris is great, that don't advance the plot, but are not uninteresting....).
Then Love Bird shows up again, and leads the little boy to a small house wherein are his grandparents--a black man and a white woman, which surprises Lonnie. His grandfather explains he came to France to fight in WW I. He was a great singer (and we have a rather nice introduction to the Harlem Renaissance, and black culture flourishing), but when he went back home, he was oppressed by the prejudice that he found there, and went back to Paris, married a beautiful French girl, and became a famous opera singer.
The scene then changes; Lonnie sees his parents and himself as a baby...he finds out his father was killed as young soldier in WW II, and his Jewish mother sent him to the US to safety with a young friend. She in turn fell ill, no-one could find the kin she had hoped to leave Lonnie with, and so he was there in the orphanage, waiting, all unknowing, for Love Bird to find him.
And because of the love bird, the missing kin are found (and Lonnie's mother reassures him that his new Aunt Connie "has dyed her own graying locks red like yours," which I find very odd) and all is well.
So it's rather strange (the love bird device in particular). The reader knows it's timeslipish, because of being told so, but basically it reads like a dream of shifting scenes and flashbacks. It's not a story, so much as an explanation of the family history with underlinings of African American and WW I and WW II history. It's not un-compelling, and it is rather interesting (especially in it's multicultural emphasis) but I find it hard to imagine curling up and reading it with a child...especially since it might provoke a child to ask questions that they might not be ready to fully grasp--like why Lonnie's Jewish mother felt she had to send him to safety. It's definitely one to read yourself before you read it to a child, so that you can expect what's going to happen next.
Ah gee. I know Faith Ringgold is a famous artist, but her people didn't appeal to me personally (speaking frankly, they looked like zombies, with stiff arms and staring eyes--vibrant, colorful zombies, but still). This, I'm quite prepared to admit, is just my own reaction.
(if you look it up on Amazon, be warned that the blurb given is for another book, so it won't be useful)
The Sterkarm Handshake, by Susan Price (Scholastic, 1998).
Imagine that, round-about our present time here in the 21st century, capitalist entrepreneurs have discovered how to travel in time. The thought of all the natural resources back there in the past, waiting to be exploited, makes them happy.
One of the time tunnels they have constructed leads to the sixteenth century in the wild boarder lands between England and Scotland. The Sterkarm clan who rule the patch of this land are fierce, treacherous, loyal to each other and not giving a damn about anyone else, and they are cognizant that the time travelers have much to offer (the aspirin tablets are a hit).
Andrea is a young anthropologist, embedded back in time among the Sterkarms. Literally--she and Per, the son of the chief are passionately involved. For Andrea, deemed unattractively large by her own society, it is nice to be lusted after, and Per does genuinely care for her....it might even be love (although I couldn't help but wonder about how much her emotions were colored by her new desirability, and this made me uncomfortable).
But all is not well. The problem with greedy exploitation is that often the people being exploited fight back, and things go sour. The trouble in this case begin when Per, gravely wounded fighting off raiders (all in a days work for the Sterkarms), is taken by Andrea to the 21st century. The director of the company, a nasty piece of work, wants him as a hostage. Per escapes, makes his way through the tunnel home, and then he and his people declare war on the 21st century, burning what they can of the tunnel.
It is rebuilt, and the 21st century comes to make war in the past. It seems as though its an uneven match--heavy artillery against bows and arrows. But arrows can kill, and the Sterkarms have years of experience with treachery and guerrilla warfare...
So it basically stopped being fantasy neo-colonialism (interesting), and became a military sci fi story (not my cup of tea), and by the last hundred pages I was skimming because everyone was running around bashing each other etc., and I ws really tired of hearing about Andrea's predicament (torn between two conflicting loyalties, and not wanting any one to be killed, and not wanting the boy she's been sleeping with to be a ruthless killer even though he clearly is etc).
And did Andrea, intelligent anthropologist, save the day with intelligent anthropologizing? No. She went to pieces, and was all "Oh Per if you love me you will be kind and do something and not kill the people from the 21st century." Disappointing.
What it needed was more characterization and less fighting, in my opinion. The bad guy was one dimensional, and so uninterestingly bad that there was little point to him. Per and Andrea are two dimensional at best. In as much as they are already sharing a bed by the time we meet them, there is no subtlety to their relationship, and I never believed that they were actually in love with each other as people, as opposed to fond bedmates (I have nothing against affectionate lust enjoyed by both parties, but it's not as interesting as the tension of love being realized), and like I said, I didn't need Andrea's dilemma drummed into my head quite so much. A few minor characters come to interesting life, most notably Joe, a homeless Sterkarm descendant of modern times, who travels back to find a better life for himself--his is a fascinating little side-story. But this wasn't enough to actually make me care all that much.
Final thought--loved the premise, and thought the story was fascinating. If the book had been about 150 pages shorter, I might well have enjoyed it lots. As it was, it kind of oozed over the edges of its central story, and I lost interest.
However, don't necessarily take my word for it---The Sterkarm Handshake
won the Guardian's Children's Prize, and got lots of critical acclaim, and is pretty much a classic of military/capitalist time-travel.
Time Tangle, by Frances Eager, was published way back in 1976, and if I had gotten hold of it back then (when I was eight) I would have loved it to pieces. Alas, as an adult reader I couldn't quite feel the love--it just didn't go
far enough with the magic of its time travel premise to make it wonderful.
Beth is a girl at a boarding school run by nuns in England, whose mother died a few months before the book begins--she is full of (mostly) repressed, and totally understandable, grief, and spends most of her time indulging in extravagant daydreams, which she narrates to herself. Her journalist father was supposed to come back to England to spend Christmas, but he can't. So Beth is going to stay with the nuns, crossing over to their side of the campus, an old manor house (unknown and exciting territory!). She doesn't mind, exactly; though she misses her father, Christmas without her mother was going to be horrible regardless.
One day Beth, wandering the cold woods outside the school, dressed up in her Elizabethan costume from the school play (which strikes me as a sensible thing to do, if you are going to wander around imagining things), and singing Greensleeves to pass the time (as one does), meets a boy named Adam. Turns out, Adam is an actual Elizabethan, who's gotten involved with the Catholic priest underground. And he shares with Elizabeth the information that a Catholic priest hidden in the manor house, and she agrees that she will be the next link in the chain of messengers, and warn him that he must not go to the next house on his itinerary, where he will be captured.
But though Adam can come and go through time (he seems to be visiting the present), Elizabeth, with exception of one vision of the Elizabethan past, cannot. And though she tries to twist the heavily painted-over Tudor rose that opens the hidden priest hole, she cannot...and the chain of warning is broken.
So its a fine story, with lots of bonus points for interesting and sympathetic nuns running a school (not something you see much of, and I've always liked a. boarding schools and b.
In This House of Brede, by Rumer Godden, which is the best book about nuns ever), and Elizabeth is a girl who reminds me of me (not the dead mother part, but the narrated imaginings part), and that is just fine, and Adam is enigmatic and appealing, and the tension is great.
But the ending fizzles, and Adam doesn't get enough page time. Fifty or so more pages, with more time travelling, and I probably would like it lots more, but as it was the balance was off. The two stories-- Beth's life in the real world, and Adam's problems in the past-- seemed to be two separate pieces of bread (unobjectionable bread) with no tasty sandwich filling making them into a glorious whole.
Short answer: if you see this in a library booksale for 25 cents, go for it. If you have an imaginative and introspective book-loving girl around your house who is eight or nine years old, you could even look for it activly.
Note on ghost vs time travel: I am categorizing this as time slip rather than ghost, because Adam is still very much within his own time, objects from the past are solid, and Elizabeth at one point sees backward into the past. But I did get a sense of the author being reluctant to fully commit herself to one or the other, and this, now that I come to type it, may be the root of my dissatisfaction.
Terry Pratchett is, of course, best known for his Discworld books, but he also wrote (among other things) a three book sci fi/fantasy series for readers 9-12, about a boy named Johnny Maxwell and his friends. Johnny and the Bomb, the third book (1996), takes Johnny and co. back in time to World War II, just as their town is about to be hit by German bombs....
Johnny knows the bombs are coming, and that people will be killed because the air raid siren isn't going to off and warn them. If he can sound the alarm, he can save them...but caught in the temporal paradoxes of changing the past, and hampered more than he's helped by his companions in adventure, he might not be able to.
Johnny and his friends are a somewhat confusing bunch of mis-fits (three boys, and one girl)--they are all rather mad, in the British sense of the word. The madness that they create just by existing is compounded when they encounter the shopping cart of a bag lady, who just happens (though they don't know it) to keep time (or something very like it) in the grotty plastic bags she wheels around. When Johnny and the friend who is a girl (mostly named Kirsty though sometimes she chooses not to be) start poking at the cart (not that they really wanted to, but these things happen), it starts whisking them through time.
And eventually all five kids are back in 1941, not adding much to moral, and not, at first, realizing that if they don't do something, the bombs will kill the very people they are meeting. It does not help that one friend has decided to travel through time wearing a German uniform.
I rather think that I had read the other two books first, I would have been altogether calmer and more receptive, happy to see Johnny and all instead of confused and unconvinced by them (although not un-entertained). But I had not, and so I was. Fortunately, I was curious enough to continue on (chuckling, it must be said, quite often), and was rewarded by a cracker-jack time-travel paradox gem when Johnny must slide around the linear path of time to sound the alarm. That part was really good (or fully realized, if you want something fancier).
Short answer: read the first book first. Read this one first only if you are a. a passionate devotee of WW II juvenile fiction b. reading every time travel book for kids you can.
Bonus: interesting bit of grim humor regarding how the residents of WW II England might react to a black boy (one of Johnny's friends)
Final note: it is never explained how or why the mysterious bag lady and her shopping cart travel through time, so don't expect to be any wiser by the end of the book.
Well, you know, you win some, you loose some...and
Dragon Magic, by Andre Norton (1972), sadly fell into the later category for me.
The premise was interesting enough--four middle school boys of desperate backgrounds and interests all living in the same neighborhood in the early 1970s, but not interested in being friends. Then one of them discovers the magic of the beautiful dragon puzzle he finds in an old abandoned house--a puzzle with four dragons. Each boy in turn puts together a dragon, which whisks him on a journey back in time, and they become friends in the present when they share their experiences.
The boys whose interactions in the present make a framing device for the stories of the past are:
Sig--ordinary guy of Germanic heritage, who finds himself helping Sigurd take on Fafnir.
Ras, aka George--a black kid, whose big brother has embraced the Black Power movement, who finds himself a Nubian prince enslaved in Babylon along with Daniel. He gets to watch Daniel overcome an African swamp dragonish creature.
Artie--would be cool boy, who goes back in time to King Arthur and learns a valuable lesson about meaningful relationships.
Kim--adopted from Hong Kong, he goes back to ancient China where there is a very confusing war going on, and comes back knowing he should try harder to make friends.
So a diverse cast of kids who don't get all that much page time, but who actually manage to be somewhat more than stereotypes, which is good, and four stories that varied a lot in interesting-ness, which wasn't so good. The first two (Sigurd and Daniel) were very interesting, the last two I found tedious.
Which could have been just me. But the particulars of the stories aside, the whole ensemble never felt enough like a cohesive story to rise above the fractures of its form and make me really care. In large part this is because the time travel magic put the boys into characters in the past--they weren't themselves, so there was no ongoing metacommentary. The stories were told straight up,with no ties back to the present, in much the same way as you might find stories anthologized in a book of "Dragon Stories of Many Lands." And on top of that, the boys had almost no agency within their stories, which made them even less interesting.
So that's generally why I didn't care for it. Here's a particular thing that vexed me--in Ras's story, Norton keeps referring to him as "the Nubian" and not by his name. All the other boys were referred to by name, and it bothered me that he was depersonalized this way.
But the dragon puzzle was beautifully described...best dragon puzzle ever.
My hopes were high. Yasutaka Tsutsui is one of the most highly regard Japanese writers of sci fi. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is one of his most popular books in Japan. I had never read any Japanese time travel before, and was tremendously eager to do so.
It's the story of a teenaged girl who acquires the ability to slip back in time. Just a few days back, but still enough to ensnarl her in paradoxes, mysteries, and sci-fi intrigue.
It should have been great! When my copy of the English translation (by David Karashima, 2011, Alma Books, 105 pages) arrived, and I saw the beautiful cover, I was even more eager to begin it.
Uh. Total rats, darn, and whine.
Sample extract:
"Morning!" called Kazuo from behind her.
"Oh, morning!" replied Kazuko, considering whether she should tell him all about the incident. Kazuo was a bright individual after all, and might be able to provide some sort of insight. But she quickly decided that it might be better to wait for Goro to arrive so they could all talk about it together.
"Is everything okay?" said Kazuo. "You look a little pale."
Kazuo was always rather attentive, so he often noticed little things like that.
"Oh it's nothing," said Kazuko, shaking her head. "I couldn't sleep much. First because of the earthquake. Then because of the fire! So I'm feeling pretty sleepy today." (p 27)
Maybe most of the blame for the clunky writing and wooden characterization can be attributed to the translator. But the final plot twist at the end, that strained all credulity, must be the author's own, and the way it's presented--future character explains everything at length--is really not sophisticated and sparkling. Plus the future character turns out to be a. 11 years old b. the love interest of this teenage girl, and that was just weird and c. able to conduct mass hypnosis at the drop of a hat on every single person (probably hundreds) with whom he's come into contact in the last few months.
So it was a big disappointment.
The English translation also includes another novella, The Stuff that Nightmares are Made Of. Not only did I find that story clunky as well, but it made me really dislike Tsutsui, because it is never funny when a mother threatens to cut off a five year old's penis with a pair of scissors so he'll be less girly.
Way back in May of 2009, I began to conciously seek out multicultural children's books, primarily in
an effort to add color to my sons' bookshelves. One of the books that I ended up buying in that initial burst of enthusiasm was
The Little Yokozuna, by Wayne Shorey (Tuttle Publishing, 2003, middle grade). And I have only just now finished it, partly because of tbr pile inertia, and partly, and sadly, because when I started it back then I realized it wasn't very good.
I still think it isn't very good. But as well as being multicultural, it is a time travel book, and so in a vague desire for completeness (someday I will have reviewed every children's time travel book ever written in English, Magic Treehouse books and other series-es for the younger reader excepted) I'm going ahead and posting about it.
Basic plot--Japanese demons have kidnapped an American girl, called Little Harriet. She disappeared in a museum garden, and her six older brother and sisters have found that the garden serves as a portal, that has whisked them, in pairs, into a whole series of other gardens, mostly Japanese. One pair of siblings ends up in Japan in the 1960s, where they meet a Japanese boy, Kiyoshi-chan. He and his family are kind and helpful. Another pair ends up becoming friends with a haiku-writing monkey named Basho. The third pair ends up in an underground pit of demons. They are reunited. They meet an enigmatic old man who is enigmatic. Demons are glimpsed; one is beheaded. More gardens are visited, too quickly to explore in detail.
Finally the six American kids and one Japanese kid end up at a Japanese demon/god sumo wrestling match. The Japanese kid enters the ring to fight for their lives (and Little Harriet).
The enigmatic old man enigmatically leads them to Little Harriet. The American kids go back to modern Boston.
Here is what I liked: Some of the garden descriptions are appealing. I like learning about new things--I now know more about sumo wrestling.
Here are the reasons why I didn't like it:
1. The character names. "Little Harriet." Her brother, "Owen Greatheart." (He wasn't even all that greathearted). Another brother, "Knuckleball." The fact that when we meet the oldest sister, Annie, her brother is calling her "Granny." This confused me. I thought she was a grandmother. The fact that Kiyoshi-chan is never just Kiyoshi (although maybe that's a nod to the reality of 1960s Japan???).
2. The multiple jumps in perspective. I coped reasonably well with all the different narrative strands, but I object to shifts in narrative perspective from one paragraph to the next.
3. The resulting fact that I never felt I knew any of the characters well enough to care about them as individuals. In particular, what with a considerable portion of the book's beginning told from the perspective of Kiyoshi-chan, I felt invested in him, and so was somewhat put out to find him becoming a minor side-kick (even when he took center stage as a sumo wrestler, and thus became the title character, "yokozuna" being the highest rank in professional sumo, he stayed minor). I think, also, that if an author tells me some of the kids are blond, but then goes out of his way to say that one has skin "the beautiful dark color of smooth chocolate," he should maybe tell me more about the familial circumstances of the kids (and make a vow never to use chocolate as a skin color descriptor ever again. I got stuck for a while at this point, thinking deep thoughts like "milk chocolate is smooth but not dark" etc.).
3. The fact that the plot made little sense, with motivations and meanings that never felt properly developed. WHY, for instance, did the kids travel through time? There is no reason, plot-wise, for this, and it didn't add to the sense that I was reading a coherent story. And what was with the talking monkey? I am fundamentally against talking monkeys whose only purpose is to introduce Basho's poetry, in a somewhat twisted fashion, to the young.
In a nutshell: It was like a confused fever dream, and I'm not adding it to my son's bookshelf.
And so that concludes this week's edition of Time Slip Tuesday. Tune in next week for a book I like more than this one.
Timecatcher, by Marie-Louise Fitzpatrick (Orion Childrens, May 2010, UK), is a time slip book like no other I have ever reviewed, in that it involves ghosts time travelling back into the past through a magical portal! I do not know of any other books with actively time-travelling ghosts.
G. is a ghost boy, haunting the old Dublin Button Factory where he died in a freak accident several years ago-- lonely, bored, and at loose ends in death. Jessie is a girl new to the city, whose attention he attracts, leading her into the old factory, which has now been refurbished as miscellaneous business spaces/artists studios. There Jessie meets two private detectives who have a secret--the stairs in their office that lead nowhere actually lead to a time portal that opens every seven years. And there in the old factory is the ghost of the man, Master Greenwood, who inadvertently opened this Timecatcher back in the thirteenth century, and who has been guarding it ever since, hoping to find some way to close it. No living person has ever used it, but ghosts can come and go...
Then there's a third ghost, a bad one, who wants to use the magic of the time portal for the most selfish of ends. He has powers the good guys don't know about....and he's on his way to the Button Factory. The Timecatcher is about to open again...
(and the bad guy has told every ghost in Dublin about this opportunity to be ghostly travellers in time, so that they will mob the Button Factory and distract the good guys--this ghostly tourist episode, though just a side note, was lots of fun!)
As well as the central story plot--the bad ghost trying to take over the Timecatcher and team of ghosts and living people trying to find the secret of how to close it--there's a substantial character-driven plot. G. the ghost boy only the wispiest memory of his life before he became a ghost, and has spent his death years aimlessly working small mischiefs, and watching the artists at work in their studios. G. is not particularly fond of Master Greenwood (who indeed is much too preoccupied with his weighty concerns to be a good friend to a kid), and Master Greenwood does not regard G. in a particularly favorable light. And so G. is faced with a character-growing situation--does he work to become trustworthy, and a good friend to Jessie and the rest, sharing his own particular ghost skill (a useful one) with the team? Or will he let his resentment and care-less attitude to life and death win? And will the others trust him, or not? I liked this aspect of the book.
Jessie is there primarily to be the reader's entree into the story, and for her it is more an adventure than a character-changing experience. But still, she is a likable girl, with a bit of backstory (the missing father, lonely mother, new girl in strange place, etc.) and enough initiative to be a valuable member of the team. Master Greenwood's backstory, on the other hand, though perhaps a bit contrived, is extraordinary.....
There is also a very nice ghost cat who's travelled through time. Jessie's terrier also gets lots of page time, and those who like small dogs will appreciate him.
Short answer: A ghost-filled time-slip story with a nice dash of character development that entertained me lots.
Sapphire Blue, by Kerstin Gier ( Henry Holt and Co, 2012, YA), is the sequel to
Ruby Red (
my review), and you absolutely have to read the first one first, or you won't have much clue what's going on. However,
Ruby Red is lots of fun, so there's no reason not to read it!
The basics of the plot: There's a secret cabral of time travellers whose genes whisk them back in time--to prevent surprise temporal whisking, they have to "elapse" in controlled time travel quite often. Gwen thought that her snotty cousin Charlotte (one of the most objectionable fictional Charlottes going) was destined to be the one who got the gene in her family...an assumption shared by all the other members of the society. So when it turns out to be Gwen instead, it comes as a shock....
There are lots of secrets to this mysterious organization that Gwen isn't being told, and a backstory of betrayals and intrigues that she's becoming ever more involved with (rather relevant backstory, because the thing with time travel is that the characters can go back themselves and become part of it). Gwen is supposedly destined to bring about some sort of milestone viz the secret cabral, and there are, apparently, rouge time travellers who left the cabral who don't want this to happen.
And then there's the complication of Gwen falling hard for Gideon, a young time traveller who might, or might not, have been involved with vile cousin Charlotte--incredibly handsome, full of secrets, and kind of a jerk, what with all his blowing hot and cold.
Keeping Gwen sane as she come to terms with all of this, and travels to the 18th century to meet with the sinister head of the cabral, is her good friend Lesley--sharp as a tack, an ace at Internet searches, and less preoccupied than Gwen (whose mind is full of her Gideon dilemma, she takes on the Mystery Solving aspects of the story. There's also James, the 18th century ghost lurking around Gwen's school, whose good for a few quick lessons in 18th-century life skills. And in this book, Gwen is adopted by the demonic spirit of an ex-gargoyle that only she can see-- a useful, though tricksy, companion....
So all this takes place in just a few days, with the result that the books are full of detail and conversation and many happenings, and a tad short on overall plot advancement. Fortunately, I found it all very enjoyable, so the lack of progress toward actually getting any clear answers to much of anything didn't bother me in the least!
The time travel, in terms of experiencing the past, is not actually a central element in the book--yes, Gwen travels back to the past, most memorably getting so tipsy at an 18th-century soiree that she entertains the guests with a song from Cats, but the time travel mostly serves to introduce Gwen (and the reader) to various characters and plot elements. So this is one to read for the entertainment value of its central character struggling to solve the mystery of a. her destiny, and the whole secret society thing and b. her relationship with Gideon, and not one to read for educational visits to the past....which, of course, is just fine.
(Just as an aside--
Sapphire Blue was originally published in German, and translated by Anthea Bell, the go-to girl for German to English YA fantasy translation. I have read a number of her translations, and I think she must be very good, because each different book she's worked on has a different feel....)
Did you ever read
The Boy, the Bear, the Baron, The Bard, by Gregory Rogers? It's a wonderful wordless picture book, involving time travel back to the age of Shakespeare, that I really must review as a Timeslip Tuesday book someday, because it is truly excellent. In any event, the titular Boy returns in
The Hero of Little Street (Roaring Brook Press, March, 2012). This time around, the boy inadvertently provokes a gang of boys, and must flee. A handy art museum offers a refugee, and there magic again enters his life when the little dog from this famous painting --
-- comes out to play with him.
The little dog jumps into another picture, the boy follows... and finds himself, via Vermeer--
--back in 17th century Holland. More than a little mayhem ensues, as boy and dog hurtle through Delft, until at last the boy saves a pack of caged dogs from become sausage meat. He then heads home to the present, with the grateful dogs close at hand to save him from the bullies.
Told with no words whatsoever, it's a story to savour with a child at hand, enjoying the details, and laughing at the humor of the various situations in which the boy finds himself. And as well as being utterly engaging as a graphic story, it's a nice introduction to the world of 17th-century Holland!
I myself can't help but prefer
The Boy, the Bear, the Baron, the Bard, because I do like the bear awfully much, but dog lovers and Vermeer lovers might like this one more!
Anyone in the market for an entertaining fantasy read, one that's lightly fun and amusingly inventive, should consider
Growing Disenchantments, by K.D. Berry (2012, Bluewood Publishing, labeled YA, but suitable for adults). It's not, you know, a World Altering reading experience of Emotional Power, but it is a fine way to spend a snowy day.
It was on such a day that I entered the world of Ragonnard, the new wizard in town, just as the young thief Ganfrey (a girl, and no unskilled) was about to break into his house. Unfortunately for Ganfrey (although it all worked out in the end), Ragonnard's home proved hard to burgle, and she ended up being caught. But he made a deal with her--steal a particular portrait from the king's castle, and all would be forgiven.
That particular portrait, a prison painted to hold a long gone evil wizard, was one Ragonnard had been searching for with a particular passion. Painted along with with the wizard is an amulet of particular power, and Ragonnard's plan is to extract the amulet, bringing it back to real world while leaving the wizard in painted place.
Things don't work out according to plan, and the evil magician is freed. Ganfrey finds herself caught up in chaos as his magic take over the castle, sending the optimistically incompetent king out on to the streets, and freeing the stone gargoyles and animating the statues of long dead kings.
But there are things more serious afoot than the deposing of kings and the philosophical conversations of gargoyles. The magician is bent on revenge on those who imprisoned him 500 years ago, and he won't let time stand in his way. Unless Ganfry and Ragonnard, with the help of a time travelling agent from the future, the court illusionist, Dewdop, and the head of castle security (who spends his free time reading mysteries, and trying to apply them in real life), can stop him, all of time's coherence will be shattered!
Entertaining stuff. I found the characters amusing, although not desperately three dimensional, and the more I read, the faster the pages turned as the excitement of the story grew. The reader has to have a certain tolerance for a bit of slapstick, almost cartoonish in places, and some awful puns (the sentient broom, for instance, is described at one point as a "heaving besom"), and a certain tolerance for plot elements that don't necessarily seem as tidily integrated into the whole as they might have been (time travelling agent from the future, popping up naked every now and then, and not actually doing much that's helpful, I'm looking at you). But if you just sit back and relax and enjoy the ride, it's lots of fun. Not quite up to the level of the Discworld books, which are my current gold standard of amusing fantasy, but a good time nonetheless.
The book is the second in a series (the first being
Dragons Away), but is perfectly fine as a stand alone. It's published in New Zealand, but it's available from
Amazon as both a book and a kindle edition. Disclaimer: I received a copy courtesy of the author (or at least, courtesy of half the author, since this was a team effort).
Anyone looking for a dated time-travel story that emphatically underlines the message that humans need to save Nature or else need look no further than
The Girl Who Slipped Through Time, by Paula Hendrich (Weekly Reader Books, 1978, 128 pages). It tells of a young girl, Paramicia, from the far future (2040), who has lived all her life isolated from what little of the natural world has survived man-made catastrophes (including droves of mutated jackrabbits). Her parents are determined to do what they can to bring the dying earth back to life...and so, as the story begins, young Para is being reluctantly dragged across a scorched wasteland of former prairie in an Air Cushion Vehicle.
And when the Air Cushion Vehicle malfunctions, our angry heroine sets out for a walk on her own...and miraculously enters a world where nature is still alive, and well...at least for the moment. She is taken in by sympathetic locals--an old woman and the boy she's been looking after. They are friendly, curious, but not too suspicious, and they can teach her valuable lessons about loving animals!
But she discovers that she is not in some bastion of miraculously intact bastion of nature with no indoor plumbing---she has travelled back in time to the 1930s just as the Dust Bowl is getting going. And there are people back then who want to eradicate all varmints! She learns this is bad, and begins to appreciate her parents' mission--but will she ever make it home to tell them?
Yes! The mysterious old woman who helps her is a space alien! Which actually isn't how she gets home again, and I'm just mentioning it because it is odd. But Paramecia does bring home two baby coyotes, as well as learning a lesson, so it was all worth while (?).
Maybe to the young reader who's never read a time travel book, never encountered a book that describes a possible future, and never read a didactic book about appreciating the environment will love this one. The characters and story are fine, I guess, though odd (the whole alien granny twist, for instance, really threw me).
But I myself found Paramicia's futuristically stiff diction off-putting, and I couldn't believe in the dramatic changes that are supposed to have occurred in technology and society. 2040 is just not far enough away, even from the point of view of 1978, when the book was written. I myself, born in the late 1960s, still plan on being around with all my quaint archaic words, like "year", in 2040, come eco-catastrophe or not. (However, judging from the cover, hairstyles stayed stuck in the late 1970s).
However, anyone looking for time travel books that teach Valuable Lessons to the Reader (as opposed to the particular character), and there aren't actually that many of them, should seek this one out.
(I am now thinking Deep Thoughts about what makes a book one with a Message, as opposed to one that just makes a reader more thoughtful and informed. I suppose, as in so many other things, it is a blurry line...)
The Crimson Shard, by Teresa Flavin, is the sequel to
The Blackhope Engima, the story of three young teenagers who enter the magical world of a Renaissance painting, where an artist/alchemist has hidden many secrets... It continues the adventures of two of these kids, Sunni and Blaise, recently returned from that journey, and enjoying being simple sight-seers in London. But a trip to the home of an 18th-century painter, master of trompe l'oeil, turns into a nightmare when their tour guide, the sinister Mr. Throgmorton, opens a painted door into the past.
Now Sunni and Blaise are trapped by Throgmorton and his nasty daughter in the workshop of the artist who painted the door--a place where semi-starving boys are forced to draw and paint constantly, copying "borrowed" masterpieces of art. They think they are learning their craft, but the whole setup is much darker than that....
Throgmorton wants Sunni and Blaise to help him get back to the Renaissance painting they visited in The Blackhope Enigma, so that he can master its magical secrets. And so they are forced to labor alongside the boys, with the threat of death hanging over their heads...and won't get to go back through the door, unless they betray secrets they should never tell.
Me--at this point I was rather doubtful. Yes, it was an interesting plot, but the plight of Sunni and Blaise back in the 18th century was very grim reading. There seems to be no way out! The orphan boys are in a miserable situation, that occasionally turns fatal on them. Blaise is being something of a lump. Living conditions are dire. Thankfully, they manage to escape.
With the help of two questionable associates of Mr. Throgmorton, whose job is to pilfer the masterpieces to be copied, the two kids find themselves on the grimy streets of London. But to get home, they must somehow find a way back through the painted door....
Me--things are much more cheerful now, and I'm enjoying my reading much more. There is hope, in the form of a group of young gentleman (and one gentlewoman) who are interested in their plight. With a mix of alchemy, luck, and determination, Throgmorton is thwarted.
Those who like historical adventure with art and magic should enjoy this one. It's a vivid portrayal of 18th century London, full of lots of detail, the plot is interesting, and the stakes high. I had a few reservations-- the plot and the descriptive details drive the story, and though Blaise and Sunni are appropriately Determined, Blaise in particular never develops much character-wise. And I was never quite convinced by the semi-romance between the two of them, thrown in at odd intervals--it felt forced. But those who revel in oppressed orphans, 18th century pick-pocketing, and feisty gentlemen (along with a sister who wants to be feisty too) may feel differently! In fact it has been nominated for
the 2013 Teen Choice Book of the Year.Though I very much appreciated the Craft Fantasy aspects of this story (it's the best incorporation of art forgery into a fantasy novel I've ever read), I much preferred the mysterious beauty of the Renaissance painting in
The Blackhope Enigma--that was truly magical. And, you know, I much prefer Renaissance Italy to 18th century London--I've never much cared for the 18th century, what with all the wigs. But though
The Crimson Shard wasn't entirely a book for me personally, I am looking forward lots to the third book in the series--
The Shadow Lantern, coming in the UK in May.
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I read this one after you wrote about his other book. A lot of fun and I enjoyed the romp through old London. Although...Shakespeare as the villain? I just don't know... Fun book though!
This was very beautiful and interesting.I loved it very much.Thanks for sharing it..
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I really enjoyed this book too!