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By John Stephens
Alfred A. Knopf, 2011
$17.99, ages 8-12, 432 pages
Three orphans travel back in time through the pages of an atlas to guard secrets that brought the world into being in the most talked-about children's novel of the year.
In this first book in a trilogy, the writer for the TV series Gilmore Girls crafts a spirited, page-turning fantasy that's at times derivative of C.S. Lewis's Narnia books, but sets itself apart with it own cleverly realized sequences of time travel.
Stephens deftly manages the consequences of going back in time and changing the course of history with a deceivingly simple plot that has the orphans rescuing a village from a terrible past and, at least for now, saving the world from a tyrant.
While wandering the eerie rooms of their new orphanage, siblings Kate, Michael and Emma discover an ancient book of wizardry that transports them 15 years into the past and sends them on a quest to defeat an evil witch who, with her master, are bent on destroying the world.
The story, the buzz of last week's Bologna Children's Book Fair, begins late at night on a snowy Christmas Eve a decade before the children find the book, as an old man whisks Kate, then 4, Michael, 2, and Emma, still a baby, away from their tearful parents just as dark forces are about to close in on the children.
As the three sleep in the backseat, the man's car barrels into the night and three dark figures in black-winged overcoats launch after them. Just as one of the phantoms begins to peel off the top of the car, the old man guns the engine and the car launches over the river and vanishes.
A second later the car pulls up, without a scratch on it, to the first of a dozen orphanages that the children are shuttled to over the next decade, each worse than the one before. Though the children never hear from their parents or other relations, they are determined that their parents are alive and will come back for them.
Kate, now 14, is the only one who remembers anything about that night. Her mother made her promise to keep Michael and Emma safe, and said that one day they'd be together again. Yet Kate struggles with feelings of being abandoned and, though pretty, shows the strain of watching over her siblings.
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