Catfish Rolling, by Clara Kumagai, for Timeslip Tuesday

I started writing this review for a Timeslip Tuesday weeks ago, but it has been a hard month.  I'm glad I came back to it though!

Catfish Rolling, by Clara Kumagai (YA, Zephyr March 2023), is a wild ride through time, though there's no traditional time travel.  The titular catfish is the giant that swims beneath the land, and its thrashing is what causes earthquakes.  And then, at the beginning of this story, it causes a time quake as well.

Sora is 11 when this quake strikes, fracturing the country into different time zones--some where time runs fast, some where it runs slow, but most still where it runs normally.  Her Japanese mother was lost somewhere in this confusion of shaking time and space, and she is determined to find her, travelling in and out of slow (where everything is perfectly preserved) and fast (where all human made things have decayed) times, all of which are haunted...Her father, a white American, also travels through the different zones, but this is his job as a scientist.  The two of them, throwing themselves at the mystery that broke their lives, are barely holding it together in the real world of ordinary time.  And the time travel seems to be taking a strange toll on her father's health....

It is a fascinating experience to travel the time zones with Sora, who on top of her grief and the strangeness surrounding her home in ordinary time feels isolated by being neither Japanese or American enough...so for much of the book, the main feeling is troubling adriftness...

The last third or so of the book picks up the pace markedly--Sora leaves her home town, partly to visit her one close friend and almost boyfriend who's gone off to college, but mostly to talk to a professor who might help her understand the time phenomena better.  The professors prize student, a girl Sora's age, becomes a friend, and then more than a friend, giving Sora a vibrant link to reality that she badly needed.  

But even more than this nice romantic element, the story starts to sing with lovely touches of the fantastical and mythological spilling out from beyond reality, and Sora and her new friend must head off on a quest deeper into time strangenesses than she has ever travelled, looking for answers that might save herself and her father, and maybe even give her the peace of accepting that her mother has gone beyond finding. And maybe even to the Catfish itself...

So in many ways it's a lovely and interesting book, and the romance is very sweet.  But it wasn't quite as lovely to read as I'd hoped.  For one thing, Sora is so consumed by her search for her missing mother that she seems very one dimensional. The fact that is told in close 1st person means that we don't see the parts of her that other characters see and appreciate, just her own rather circular thoughts and feelings, which include a lot of negativity about herself.  So it is hard not to feel negative about her, since that is what the reader must experience.

I also would have liked the mythological, magical elements to come in even sooner and stronger than they did, but that's just a personal preference.

And finally, the time zones are confusing as heck, impossible to explain, and full of unanswered questions about how they work and what is happening to living things within the different time zones. For instance, it seems like a bad idea for kids to go into fast zones to cram for tests, because they are aging while they are there, and presumably shortening their lifespans in the real time.  There are far too many questions of this sort for the author to address, and wisely, she doesn't try even as she sends her main character out looking for answers.  So one has to just relax and let it happen, which might not be everyone's cup of tea.  It sure does leave the reader with a lot to ponder though, and that's one of the best gifts a book can give you.

Sandy and the Hollow Book, by Meta Mayne Reid, for Timeslip Tuesday

Sandy and the Hollow Book, by Meta Mayne Reid, is the sequel to The McNeils at Rathcapple, and if you haven't read that one then you will find this one confusing.....The first book introduces Sandy and Richard as they move the family manor in rural Ireland, inhabited by an unwelcoming elderly uncle and his vast collection of books (he is researching local history). The two kids get to learn local history in a different way, through time travel, which comes in handy when they take part in the local pageant organized by the lady of the local castle.

So here in the sequel, I was expecting both more pageant and more time travel.  The pageant part proved to be much more important.  The main driver of the story is that the lady of the castle feels too old and tired to take it on again, and the kids and their friends set to work to make it happen.  The uncle has no patience for theatrical liberties taken with the past, so Sandy sneaks into his library to try to ferret out fresh content...and finds a hollowed-out book, in which is a small collection of random things--like bits of vegetation, a rock, a button....and some torn out quotations from Virgil (sic).

These small things, plus a visit from the magical Angus, the horseriding Spirit of Place who was a big part of book one, send the kids and friends back to the Irish famine, where they inhabit, variously, the wealthy who have food and the poor who don't and come back a lot more famine aware.  Good pageant content, bad time travel--they aren't themselves in the past, and after a while they don't even remember being there.  Time travel tourism at its worst, if you ask me.

Small adventures and happenings occur, including a rather nicely done mountain injury and an interesting mystery from the more recent past being solved,  and the pageant is a success.  The things in the box have only one more very minor bit to play, that doesn't involve time travel, and I was left feeling a tad disappointed (thought the Vergil quotes turned out to be interesting, which I appreciated).

In short, enjoyable as a story, but a time travel let down. Worth picking up if you, like me, are a fan of vintage childrens books set in Ireland and see it going for a reasonable price (especially since you may be able to resell it for a higher one....) and a must have if you are writing an essay on historical pageants in 20th-century literature for the young (which I am not).

Moon Window, by Jane Louise Curry, for Timeslip Tuesday

Moon Window, by Jane Louise Curry (1996), was supposed to be my time travel Tuesday book two weeks ago, but life got in the way....so here's just a quick look at it, enough so that I can add it to my master list of time travel books.

Jo Ellen and her mother were everything to each other, until her mother falls in love, and Jo is confronted with the horrible fact that she will now have a stepfather.  In order to facilitate the honeymoon, Jo ends up being sent off to stay with an elderly cousin, Granty, who lives in a fabulous replica of a Scottish castle in the middle of nowhere, with a strange "moon window" up in the attic...  And although Jo's determined to wreck the honeymoon by running away, she's fascinated by the place in spite of herself.

Even more so, when she finds herself slipping back in time through the moon window.

Not only does she meet the little girl who will become Granty, she starts to learn that there is a dark story behind the grand estate....the story of "Witch Ellen," the Scottish woman who had the castle built, who is very much still a force to be reckoned with, and not in a good way.

Time travel and secrets reveled in the present bring the mystery to a terrible climax, that ties up loose threads the reader didn't even know where waiting to be tied.

It was a mixed bag for me.  I thought Jo was a brat, but also thought her mother was a brat too; for instance, moving them into her new husband's place and not taking old familiar furnishings that Jo loved with them.  I like big old houses in stories, and this one had some nice details, but it was strangely static and never became quite real.  This actually fits with the plot beautifully, but was disappointing for me.

I did enjoy the time travel; there's a nice sense of strangeness to the first trips especially, and a nice ratcheting up of time travel tension as things progress.  But though it added to the story, and the characterization of both Jo and Granty, I can't remember that it actually functioned much with regards to the larger plot point of the malevolent magic at the heart of the story.

In short, though I was quite happy to be reading it, and interested enough in what was happening that the pages turned quickly, I'll probably never read it again.  But I bet I would have if I'd been given a copy as a 9 year old.

The Rise of Issa Igwe, by Shanna Miles, for Timeslip Tuesday

The Rise of Issa Igwe, by Shanna Miles (October 2024, Union Square Kids, middle grade), combines time travel with another favorite subgenre of mine, the magical boarding school. and I enjoyed it lots!

Issa did not want to go to the Siren School.  She wanted to travel with her parents.  But her magical gift of being a conduit for the dead was out of control, and her parents felt she needed a structured education.  So off to boarding school it was.  

The school isn't awful.  There's the chance to make friends for the first time, lots of magic to learn, and a beautiful campus...but before Issa can change her mind about not wanting to be there, tragedy strikes, and her parents are killed driving away from the drop-off.  

Issa knows that one of the classes taught at the Siren School is horology...the magic of bending time.  And if time can be bent, maybe the past can be undone, and she can save her parents.  So along with all the nice school stuff--friends and magical animals and such--she's driven to learn more magic as quickly as possible. 

The school might offer great classes, but it also offers nightmares, hinted at by its past of plantation slavery, its disturbing headmistress, and warnings to the current students about the Night Children.  And the more she sees of her new school, the more Issa is distracted from her personal goal by the growing realization of the horror at the heart of the school.  A horror that plans to add her to the graves of many other past students.....

In short, it's a fun story of a plucky smart girl vs ancient evil, with interesting twists, including the time slipping at the end.  Middle grade fans of magical schools should eat it up, fans of horror, though, might be a bit let down, as I was, by the horror turning out to be relatively straightforward and not as deliciously creepy as the Night Children made it sound.  It's also not one for pure time travel fans--the time travel bit was there to drive Issa's story and not a point in its own right, and it ended up happening in a way that didn't feel quite earned.

That being said, the mix of it all made for good reading, and the successful confrontation with the evil at the school's heart was beautifully earned by Issa's stubbornness and strength of character, with the help of friends, the ancestors and their magic, a mysteriously haunting boy, and two sweet cats!

Storm at the Edge of Time, by Pamela F. Service, for Timeslip Tuesday

Storm at the Edge of Time, by Pamela F. Service (1994), is the first book by this late 20th/early 21st century author of children's fantasy/sci fi that I've read.   Her first book, Winter of Magic's Return, was published in 1985, when I was in college and not reading much for pleasure...And then the 1990s were a difficult time reading-wise for me--I would go to libraries and bookstores and not find anything that looked good.  It was so wonderful when the internet happened, and my tbr pile never looked back.  But in any event, this evening I finished reading Storm at the Edge of Time.

Three young teenagers, Arni (a Viking), Jamie (a contemporary American girl), and Tyaak (a half alien from the far future) are all on Orkney in their different times when they are pulled back to the ancient past by a magician desperately trying to save the universe from destruction.  The magician spent most of his own power 6000 years ago in the past, and the three staffs that were once joined in a single tree of protective power were scattered.  The three kids are descendants of the magician, and have inherited some of his power, and so they are pitted against the forces of darkness, desperately search for the staffs in their own time periods.  

They are not a natural team, they have no idea what they are doing, they are time travelling (1 person in their own time, the other 2 not), and powerful agents of darkness, who do know what they are doing magic-wise, are trying to get the staffs themselves.  Unfortunately, the book is too short to do justice of all of this, and the Three Time Travel adventures ended up feeling sort of skittery and surface level, with the occasional elements of good description and emotional depth making the reader (me) want the whole thing to be more...

The part that I actually enjoyed best was the bit where Jamie is introduced--dragged to Orkney by birdwatching parents, she's annoyed and isolated, and desperate to see a ghost so that she can have something that is special about her....This very introspective, character focused section is a sharp contrast to the adventures in time.  The two boys each get their own introductory bit too, but these are short and don't quite make their characters three dimensional, especially that of the half alien from the future, who is just an unpleasant grump for most of the book.  

All this being said, I didn't mind reading the book at all, though I do wish it had pushed a bit more past the adventures into the characters.  And I will certainly pick up Pamela Service's New Magic series and stand alone books if they come my way, though probably not her Alien Agent and Way-To-Real Aliens books....

The Isle of Ever (Isle of Ever, #1), by Jen Calonita, for this week's Timeslip Tuesday

The past month has been a heard one for me, leaving no time for blogging, but I'm back with The Isle of Ever (Isle of Ever, #1), by Jen Calonita, for Timeslip Tuesday! The Isle of Ever is the sort of book that makes me glad I didn't start "Time Travel" Tuesday, because there isn't any time travel of the ordinary sort happening here.  But time is very slippy indeed.  

This isn't a spoiler--the book begins with a 19th century Long Island girl, Evelyn, visiting an island that doesn't show up on any maps, and that only she and a few other kids are aware of.  On the island she meets a 17th century pirate, so clearly the island is not obeying the ordinary rules of permanent temporal and spatial placement!  

Then we cut to Everly, known as Benny, an ordinary girl, living in ordinary modern times, whose world with her single mom is one of constant moving and financial anxiety.  Her life is upended when she finds she's inherited a fortune and a Long Island estate from her many times great-grandmother, the Evelyn of the 19th century.  But to claim her inheritance, she has to solve the clues Evelyn has left that will lead her, if she succeeds, to the island that doesn't exist.  

And so, alongside two new friends, Benny races against time from one clue to the next, desperate to figure out the island's secrets....not the least of which is the slippy-ness of its place in time.

The inheritance part is great wish-fulfilment for all of us readers who long for such a legacy! Benny's new estate is all a young reader could ask for.  And the making of friends is also wish-fulfilment for lonely Benny.  The mystery is intriguing with plenty of nice twists along the way (include a rare Blood Orange Moon, a deadly yellow fever epidemic, and unexpected family connections and betrayals. The hunt is interspersed with Evelyn's diary entries, which both help Benny along the way, and deepen the wonderous, terrible, magic of the island. It's great middle grade reading (and gripping for adult readers too!).  

My only disappointment was with the ending, which is in fact another beginning.  It will be a long wait for book two!

Thunderbird, Book Three, by Sonia Nimr, for Timeslip Tuesday

Thunderbird, Book Three, by Sonia Nimr (September 10, 2024 by Ctr for Middle Eastern Studies UT-Austin), is the final book in the story of a Palestinian girl, Noor, who must travel back in time to find the feathers of the Thunderbird in order to save our present-day world from monsters.

I really loved the first book. In my review I said "I completely agree with the conclusion of the Kirkus review (which is how I found out about this one)--"This richly descriptive novel paints a moving portrait of a lost, lonely girl; a historic land with a painful past and present; and an enchanting magical world. The cliffhanger ending will leave readers eager for more."

And I enjoyed the second even more. From my review--"It is a lovely mix of the magical (the boundaries between our world and the supernatural world are starting to slip....) and the historical; very satisfying both as middle grade time travel and as plucky girl adventure! It's a fairly short, tightly written book, with humor alongside of tension and heartfelt emotion, and it's a vivid portrayal of this particular moment in time. Of course "let's save the precious library!" is a plot I am always there for, and fortunately I wasn't kept in too much desperate tension...."

This time she is plunged back to Byzantine Jerusalem in 638 CE, just as Omar ibn al-Kahttab is about to conquer what was then a Christian city.  As was the case with the first two books, she starts her quest for the feather by finding allies--this time a brother and sister with a magical gift for healing.  But rather than an exploration of this part of Jerusalem's history, with real world obstacles such as are to be expected in perilous times, to be overcome, the book turns into an other world fantasy adventure .

Noor and her new friends are captured by monstrous devouring worm creatures, and escape from them to find themselves in a world of gentle telepaths.  This world is under genocidal attack from monstrous, devouring invaders, and it is up to Noor and her new friends, with help from her companion Sabeeka, a djinn who takes the form of a cat, to lead these people in fighting back for the sake of their future.  Once this is successfully accomplished (and if you like fantasy battles you'll find this good reading--lots if ingenuity, unlikely allies, and fantastical creatures), it's back to Jerusalem where the finding the Thunderbird features feels like an anticlimax.

This third book in the series didn't work for me. I was not expecting a fantasy adventure that explicitly underlined a parallel to Palestine vs Isreal, with the Israelis irredeemably monstrous.  Even if this had not been the case, I would have been disappointed not get the cross-cultural, historically rich, time travel experience I'd hoped for.  Additionally, Noor's story began with real world sadness and trauma, and I would have liked this emotional arc to be more fully resolved.

Time Spinner, by Roy Apps, for Timeslip Tuesday

Time Spinner, by Roy Apps (1990), is a fun one for younger readers (8-10 year olds).  Rosemary is a kid living out in the far reaches of the solar system about 100 years from now.  It's a clean, safe, sanitized existence, and with no other kids her age around, and nothing much to occupy her time (homework doesn't count) she is bored our of her mine.  The one thing she finds interesting is when her Gran shows her the illicit treasures from the Elizabethan Age of Earth (meaning Elizabeth II, not I) that she keeps hidden.  But when her parents come home unexpectedly to find Rosemary holding a glass bottle, disaster happens--she drops it and it breaks.  And then to make things worth, her parents destroy everything else in the secret stash, even the picture of Rosemary's great-grandmother--unsanitary relics are forbidden.

So Rosemary decides to break an even more stringent rule.  She's allowed to take the family space travel vehicle out for short spins, but definitely not allowed to use its time travel feature.  But she has to get another picture of her gran, and maybe another wonderful glass bottle as well....so she sets off for an English school in the late 20th century.

She is in for a ton of culture shock, and this makes for entertaining reading!  Fortunately she meets a friendly boy, who does his best to keep her out of trouble, and despite many missteps and culture shocks, she has the time of her life, making it home safely with a bottle, though not the picture.....It's a really solid portrayal of modern life seen through the eyes of a kid from a sterile space existence future, and tasted through her mouth that has never eaten plant or animal (all her other senses are in for rude awakenings of their own--I think this is perhaps the most sensory time travel book I've ever read.....)

I gave it four stars over on Goodreads primarily because it's a great one for the target audience, who will find it very entertaining. It didn't have quite enough heft to it for non-target audience me to really love it (it's only 117 pages of generous font), but I found it a fun fast read.

The Mud Puddlers, by Pamela Rushby, for Timeslip Tuesday

The Mud Puddlers, by Pamela Rushby (middle grade, April 2023, Walker Books Australia), is a must read for anyone in the ven diagram of liking mud larking and liking juvenile time travel, as it combines both in a nicely absorbing package!

Nina is tremendously angry that her parents are going off on a scientific expedition to Antarctica and shipping her from their home in Australia to her Aunt Bea in London.  Even the rather cool prospect of living in a converted barge on the Thames, and spending time with her aunt who she has liked before being packaged off to stay with her, does nothing to alleviate Nina's angry sulking.  The first chinks in her studied disinterested in everything and everyone come when she gradually becomes drawn into her aunt's hobby, mud larking.  

At first the discoveries in the mud are just interesting and thought provoking, but then there's a twist--they begin to take Nina back in time.  The very odd old hardcore mudlarking woman who lives nearby also has this knack and warns Nina that she must always keep the object that took her back in time safe, or else....

And of course she doesn't.

The time travel starts as tourism, taking Nina back to observe various eras of London's past, which was fine and not uninteresting, but rather slow.  Then about 3/4 of the way through, Nina is stuck in the past while being evacuated from London in WW II. In the train station, she loses the gas mask that had taken her back in time which she needs to get home again. After arriving in Wales, she and a boy desperate to get back to his own family set out for London, with one "borrowed" bike between them, not enough money, and the fear of being caught and dragged back again nipping at their heals. Their journey becomes do-able when they are taken on as crew by two women doing war work running a canal boat, and I do wish this had been given more page time!

Nicely absorbing, as I said above, but I can't go any further.  Mostly this is because Nina hangs on to her angry sulking so long it became unbelievable; it took being stuck in the past to change her perspective.  It was also a bit because the arc of the story never pushed quite hard enough into truly gripping emotion.  As an archaeologist, there were small material culture irritations too, like Aunt Bea saying you can't tell historic nails apart, which is wrong (it is pretty easy to tell a hand wrought nail from a machine cut nail), and Aunt Bea saying the reason why pipe stems are a common find is that pipes were disposable (almost true, but it was more a matter of breaking off the used end of the pipe and working your way to the bowl). So I can't say with conviction that I'll read it again, though I might well do so.

Seven Days Wonder, by Elizabeth Denys, for Timeslip Tuesday

Back again with a time travel book for this Tuesday!  Seven Days Wonder, by Elizabeth Denys, illustrated by Margery Gill, is the sort of book that readers of mid-20th-century fiction will pounce on, and then if they are me they will be very happy to see that it's a time travel book! 

It's a rather sweet story of a lonely little Victorian girl, Louisa, who slips through time into the mid 20th century when she falls while swinging and is unconscious.  When she comes to herself, the house and garden that should be familiar is all wrong; not nearly as grand and tidy as it should be....and she quickly realizes that something very strange has happened. She is, in fact, in mid 20th century England. 

Though the house is not nearly as grand as it was, the family who now live there give her a warm welcome. This is the first she has had the constant company of children her own age to enjoy. Much of the book is about the modern kids being amused by Louisa encountering strange things, and Louisa struggling to make sense of the modern world.  This grows a bit old, but the parts that highlight the family are charming; these are really nice parents, and the friendship between Louisa and 20th-century Peggy (a first for Louisa) is good reading.  

What I would have liked more of--there is one visit to the attic, where old odds and ends are stored.  Louisa recognizes many of them.  There are some treasures found, but I wanted more poking for family mementos etc. in dusty trunks than I got!  

Even though the time travel part felt repetitive after a while, the charm of the family story parts was very pleasing. I had to round up to get to four stars, because it is a little too young for grownup me to love, but I still enjoyed it lots and regret that this seems to be the only book she wrote...Since I'm the only one who's read it on Goodreads, I linked to it on Internet Archive instead, in case other fans of gentle 20th century English girl's fiction are interest in reading in..... 

Countdown to Yesterday, by Shirley Marr, for Timeslip Tuesday

Countdown to Yesterday, by Shirley Marr (June 2024, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, middle grade) is a blend of realist fiction with sci fi (ish) time travel.  When we meet 11 James, he's feeling that things are rather off at home, though the only thing that's truly strange is his Chinese-Australian mother entering the school's cake making fundraiser for the first time and picking out the most challenging one from all on offer in the Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book.  But then things abruptly fall apart; his mother tells him she's moving out to an apartment of her own.  Suddenly, James is forced to split his life between her rather rundown new place (with new rocket cakes, all flawed, appearing regularly) and the old house, full of his father's computers and empty without his mom.  His memories of happy times in the past make him long for those days.

School is not the top thing on his mind, but it's a distraction when he meets Yan, a loner girl obsessed with vintage computer books.  Hanging out in the school library they get to talking about parents, and about time machines.  Yan says she's created one, and James' heart leaps at the idea of travelling to the past of a happy family.  But he's disappointed when it's just a wayback computer program--it's cool to see what was on the internet in the past, but not what he wants.

But then, with the help of his dad's computer bank, and pictures of the past, Yan delivers for real.  James goes back in time to relive all the precious memories he's holding onto so tightly....only to discover that they weren't quite how he remembered them....

There's lots of good details about cake and cake drama, friendship, and the emotional fallout of parents separating.  And the time travel is quite cool, and serves the emotional arc of the story well.  That being said, it took a long for this to become more than a rather sad story of a lonely boy whose parents divorce.  Yan doesn't ever become as three dimensional a character as James, but more importantly to me as a reader, the time travel doesn't get going until about 2/3 of the way into it.  When it does, things pick up considerably, and the pages turn quickly, but there wasn't quite enough of this very engrossing part for me to entirely get over the depressed feeling that James' situation left me with.

The Rushton Inheritance, by Elisabeth Mace, for Timeslip Tuesday

Back with another vintage one for Timeslip Tuesday--The Rushton Inheritance (1978), by Elisabeth Mace.  It's a nice seasonal read set in a rural pub in the cold and snowy north of 19th century England.

Tom's time at school is running out; soon he'll be old enough to work alongside his father in the family pub.  He feels (with good reason) trapped, and dreams of running off to London to do something (he's not sure what exactly....).  Escaping the needy baby of the family who he gets stuck with more than he thinks is right and his youngest sister, who's a bit of a brat, would be an added bonus.  In the meantime, his grandmother makes use of his excellent penmanship to record her treasury of wisdom, mostly rather disgusting treatments for various conditions that bring Tom no joy to contemplate.  

But then a mysterious boy, Steve, appears seemingly out of nowhere, who turns out to be a visitor from the 20th century, coming and going to Tom's time unpredictably.  His family has found suggestive evidence that there was something of value at Tom's home back in the 19th century.  And so a treasure hunt ensues, gradually involving more and more people, including the local bullies and Tom's excentric great-aunt, who lives in a hovel of her own choosing instead of with the family.

It's a fine read, with Tom's world and family coming into sharper and sharper focus as it progresses, which was nicely done.  And Steve's time traveling was also good--it takes a while for it to be clear both to the characters and the reader what is happening.  It also serves not just to provide plot, but to provide to Tom greater perspective on his own life.

Sadly the ending was a bit of a let down, and it ended up not being quite a book I loved, though I did enjoy it.

The Future Took Us, by David Severn, for Timeslip Tuesday

I'm back with another vintage time travel book for this Tuesday--The Future Took Us, by David Severn (1958, Puffin Books).  Two mid-20th century schoolboys (Peter, the protagonist, and Dick) are saved from being caned by their headmaster by being suddenly and inexplicably plunged out of his study and into the countryside. It is a not quite right countryside, which disturbingly includes an impossibly high (by mid 20th century standards) metal tower, partially ruined.... Its inhabitants, living Medieval subsistence farming sort of lives, with no technology (not even the wheel), speak an almost intelligible English, and are friendly enough.  And the two boys realize after picking up on various clues, including a ruined girder from the tower embedded in an ancient oak tree, that they have travelled in time and are in the future.

Dick, who embodies the spirit of the British empire, immediately wants to bring technology to their lives, but his first effort at steam power goes badly, and his attempt to introduce the wheel is met with horror. There is good reason for the horror.

The medieval-esque peasants aren't the only class of people around; there is also a ruling priestly class, who practice mathematics to excess and hoard technology to themselves.  They are clearly Bad.  For instance, as well as looking Bad--they have bald shaven heads and glower nastily, they are the only ones who get to use the wheel, and they do, as a means of killing people who dissent or disobey their fanatical rule.  They have used their own rather marvelous technology to bring people from the past to add to their store of knowledge.  Attempt #1 brought them a Neanderthal, which wasn't useful, Attempt #2 was a winner, resulting in a 22nd century engineer (who wants to get back to his family), and Attempt #3 another dude-the two boys.  But even though the boys aren't any use to them, they aren't going waste time sending them back.

There is also a Resistance of people fed up with being killed on wheels, featuring a remarkable girl who can do everything physical (archery, riding, hunting etc.) better than the boys (Dick is very taken with her), and her brother, described over and over again as "the crippled boy" which grated more than a little.   Adventures and perils ensue as the boys and their allies break into the Mathematicians citadel, bring down their regime, and get home.... except for Dick, who chooses to stay with the Atalanta of the resistance (one gets the sense that he can't leave until he is better at archery, riding, hunting, etc. than she is....)

This is a book best read by 1950s children who haven't read all the better books still to come.  The plot, though fine, is not quite well developed and nuanced enough to make this a great book, and the story is slowed by lots and lots and lots of description (so much description it was hard to actually picture anything due to my mind's eye glazing over...).  There isn't much to speak of in the way of characterization, or finely drawn emotional peaks and valleys.  I doubt I will ever want to reread it.

However, this is an interesting one for us serious readers of juvenile time travel.  E. Nesbit's The Story of the Amulet is the first time travel book in juvenile fiction written in English to take children into the future, but that was just one episode of many.  The Future Took Us seems to be the earliest book published in English that makes this sort of time travel the plot of the whole book.* This particular twist on time travel hasn't gotten much attention since (in my time travel book list, there are only ten that involve travelling to what is the future from the main character's point of view).   Bits are reminiscent of H.G. Wells, and Severn adds very little in the way of wild original imagination.  The time travel ends up reading more like a portal fantasy to an alternate England than travel to a future one, and I wonder if Severn had just read the Narnia books when the idea for this story came to him.

This is the fourth book by David Severn I've read.  Several did get published here in the US, but don't seem to have caught on.  Though this one was disappointing, I will still be looking out for his other books, especially Dream Gold, which Kirkus rather liked and which is still, according to Worldcat, on the shelves of the Colorado City, TX public library (one of his books even got a Kirkus star). I can see why he didn't make it into the cannon of great mid 20th century English books that are still in print, but the two books of his I've read that aren't The Future Took Us and Drumbeats (another time travel story I didn't care for) come quite close to being ones I really liked a lot. 

*feel free to point out ones I missed!

Sylvia Doe and the 100-Year Flood, by Robert Beatty, for Timeslip Tuesday

As is often the case, to write about a book for Timeslip Tuesday is to spoil it right of the bat. But knowing Sylvia Doe and the 100-Year Flood, by Robert Beatty, involves time travel doesn't spoil the readers enjoyment of the book, and it's pretty clear early on that there's weirdness of a temporal sort going on....

Thirteen year old Sylvia was found alone in a storm as a very young child, and was taken in by Highground, a temporary home and school for children in difficult circumstances.   She watched as the other children went home or found new foster homes, but Highground was always home for her.  When she herself was fostered out, she always ran away back to it, where the horses she loved some much were waiting for her.  And this is how we meet her, stowing away in the back of a truck in a storm.  She had tried to stay at her latest placement, but with a hurricane hitting North Carolina hard, she couldn't stand not being back at Highground to make sure the horses were safe....

When she arrives in darkness and wind and torrential rain, her worst fears are realized.  The barn is empty.  And so she sets out to bring them to safety through the flooding.  The horses are not all she rescues; out in the storm she saves a boy about her own age, Jorna, from drowning.  He's adamant that she not tell anyone she's seen him, as he is in trouble with the law back home upstream from Highground.  When she hears his story, she is determined to help him.

This is not all that is strange about the flooding river--glowing with strange blue light, it's carrying along creatures that have no business at all in 21st century North Carolina.  

Figuring out what's happening, helping to care for the horses, and keeping Jorna hidden, safe, and fed, all the while worrying about her future (Highground has taken her in again, but the authorities are displeased) is a lot.  To help Jorna get home again safely is even more....the river that brought him to Sylvia is indeed extraordinary, and to unravel its secrets means dangerous adventuring through the still flooded landscape.

In the end, all the pieces fall into place, and Sylvia finds her very own family who had been grieving for her ever since she herself had been swept away by floodwaters.

So since this is a Timeslip Tuesday post, I must say that Jorna is from the 19th century, and the river is bringing extinct fauna from a wide variety of ancient and more recent periods.   The author had to walk a difficult line between making Jorna not immediately recognizable as a 19th century kid, while still leaving clues, and he did this pretty well (except that I would expect more differences of language then was the case here...).   And although the time travel river has to be taken as a given, it did have a certain logic to it.  So it was just fine time travel wise, except that this wasn't a book that was centered on exploring the repercussions and experience of time slipping.  The time travel was a mechanism for a story that was ultimately one of finding home.

It also works well as an exciting disaster/adventure story, and there is also a lovely thread of Sylvia's interest in nature (the book includes illustrations form her notebook).  In short, there is much that should please the intended audience.

(The one thing that did not please me was one of Sylvia's horse decisions--her favorite horse collapses exhausted after the first evening of swimming through the flood, but the next day Sylvia makes it canter while carrying both her and Jorna.  There's lots of additional horses being pushed too hard as well, although these weren't anyone's fault....Probably as a 10 year old I would have loved the horsey bits best, but as a grownup I liked the bits that focused on what was happening at the home/school better....)

(It was hard reading this while an actual hurricane was causing devastation to the very same part of North Carolina.  The flood in the book was meant to be terrible, but it didn't come close to real life.)

disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher

The Queen of Ocean Parkway, by Sarvenaz Tash, for Timeslip Tuesday

The Queen of Ocean Parkway, by Sarvenaz Tash (September 3, 2024 by Knopf Books for Young Readers), is a really nice book in the best possible sense of the word; I would have loved it as a ten-year-old and very much enjoyed it as a grownup.  

Roya's mom is the superintendent of a 100-year-old apartment building in Brookly, the titular Queen of Ocean Parkway.  Roya is always busy helping out her mom, while practicing to become an investigative journalist by putting out a podcast about the residents (more mystery of the clogged drain in 3B sort of thing than gossip).  And as such, she keeps her ears open for interesting tidbits.  This habit leads into a complicated mystery when she hears two new tenants, a couple, Katya and Stephanie, discussing whether or not Katya will disappear like other women in her family have had a habit of doing, never to return.  Katya does in fact disappear, and Roya is determined to find out what has happened.

With the help of another newcomer to the Queen, a boy named Amin with an eidetic memory (so helpful to mystery solving), she dives into the history of Katya's family, one that is tied to a fortune telling machine on Coney Island.  It turns out that the machine is the family's time travel device, taking one woman in each generation back in time every 25 years or so, and never returning them.  But Katya's determined to break the pattern, and bring Katya back, even if it means travelling back in time herself, along with Amin.

The trips back in time take the two kids to the point where each woman in Katya's family makes their trip.  But how to get Katya back to her own time instead of leaving her to age 25 years before the point where she is supposed to be with Stephanie? Roya's Baba, who she doesn't live with (her parents being divorced) proves to be a great help with the theoretical side of time travel (and Roya is beyond happy to find this point of connection, as Baba is undergoing cancer treatment and quite possibly dying, so her visits to him were strained before they could talk about this new subject of mutual interest).  But Roya gets a little sidetracked when it occurs to her that 25 years ago she might be able to leave a message for her father telling him to seek out help sooner when he first gets sick....

And so the reader gets what is both a fascinating time travel mystery, full of the desperate need to fix the past and save loved ones so they can have a future with their families.

It's a story full of lots of lovely details (for instance, about the mundanity of old apartment life, how each different time period 25 years apart is different yet similar), lots of great characters, and fascinating time shenanigans (rooted in science, which we learn about through Baba's academic side of things, that I appreciated lots).  It's also a lovely letter to an imaginary old New York hotel, and makes me want to visit Coney Island, where I've never been.  And it's a great read--it left me thinking that if the Newbery Committee that honored The Westing Game with its win back in 1978 were to be reconvened for this year, they might well pick this one.

 

Zoe Rising

 If you've read and enjoyed Stonewards, by Pam Conrad, you might, like me, be excited to learn there's a sequel, Zoe Rising.  You might also be slightly disappointed--Zoe Louise, the child central to the time travel of the first book, is not present in this one, and we don't learn anything new about her or her story.  Instead, we reconnect with Zoe at summer camp, the first time she's ever been away from home.

When the news breaks that one of the other camper's parents have been killed in a car accident, Zoe becomes consumed by the fear that her grandparents are also somehow at risk.  And this worry sends her travelling back in time...to visit with her own mother when she was a little girl.   Zoe's mother was pretty bad at being a good and present mother, leaving Zoe with her grandparents and only visiting occasionally, seemingly a shell of a person.  

But in the visits Zoe pays to her mother's childhood, she is witness to the horribly traumatic event that change the happy child into the emotionally absent woman, and she strives mightily to alter the course of events.  And is successful, to a point, saving her from what we imagine was the utter horror the little girl of the past might have otherwise endured.

The time travelling makes it hard for Zoe to be a good camper, and everyone is relieved when it's time to go home....and home, for the first time in Zoe's life, now includes her mother...

It's satisfying time travel, and a fine story in general, but somehow it doesn't quite hit the emotional high points that would make any more powerful.  So although I enjoyed it just fine, I probably will never feel the need to re-read it.

The House in the Square, by Joan G. Robinson

 

Joan G. Robinson was the author of When Marnie Was There, a rather well-known mid 20th-century timeslip book, so I was pleased to acquire another book of hers, The House in the Square (1972), which was apparently also time-slip.  Turns out it's very time-slip light....

Jessie is packed off to London to stay with her mother's old headmistress, who is planning to turn her large house into a small school.  She is looking forward lots to the company she'll have, but to her dismay there are no other girls in residence....and as the days pass, with no lessons and no other boarders, her spirits fall.  Finally she's enrolled in the local school, but gets off to a bad start socially, and so she remains lonely and isolated. 

 In the public garden across the way, where she often goes to visit the lovely statue of a girl, she hears the voices of children playing, and ganging up on one child called Melly, but never sees them.  Also in the garden is an old woman in raggedy clothes, who doesn't seem to have all her wits and who rummages through the rubbish bin, who she gets to know to some extent. 

(any moment now, I thought, lonely Jessie will time travel and meet the children....)

Rooms are let in the old house, an actress comes to stay, and she charms Jessie, but her sparkly gold turns out to be dross when she leaves with the ex-headmistresses squirreled away bit of money.  Naturally, because this is that sort of book, Jessie is suspected.  

She finds the part of the garden where the children's voices were coming from has been built on, and never hears them again.

Mercifully by the end of the book things get better for Jessie, but the time slipping never progresses past voices of unseen children. The old woman turns out to have been the girl Melly, which did not surprise me.

A disappointment, although possibly if you aren't expecting time travel and have more tolerance for well-written and vividly described gloom you will enjoy it more than me.  It felt like realistic fiction with a bit of fantasy tacked on for no apparent reason.  The illustrations by Shirley Hughes are of course nice.

The Secret Library, by Kekla Magoon, for Timeslip Tuesday

 

The Secret Library, by Kekla Magoon, has been out since May, and having enjoyed other books by the author, and liking libraries, I meant to read it....and then about a month ago I realized it was a time travel book, so there was no more waiting and here it is as this week's Timeslip Tuesday book.

Dally is a child of great wealth and privilege, but her life is horrible circumscribed.  Her grandpa, who brought adventure and fun into her life, has died, her (black) father died when she was very young, and her (white) mother is inflexibly focused on training Dally to someday assume control of the family business.  Being only 11, she would rather not have business tutoring most evenings after school, but that is her life.  There is no reasoning with her mother.

(me--her mother really is something else.  She's so awfully unaffectionate and single-minded and business focused that she's unbelievable, and this disminished my enjoyment of the book.)

Then Dally gets hold of an envelope her grandpa left with her, not to be opened until she's 21.  Of course she opens it, and it leads her to a Secret Library.

(me--I was taken aback to find that this is not a hidden sort of secret library, but literally a library of people's secrets, that can be checked out and visited in a time travel way.  I like hidden libraries more than I like libraries that make secrets available; I'd hate to have one of my own kids visiting my secrets...)

 So Dally begins to find secrets that call to her, learning secrets from her parents' life before her father died by actually travelling through time to watch things happen. 

(me-- it was nice that Dally had this magical chance to see her father and mother when they were young and in love (very sweet), and to see her grandfather again).

However, there are intimation that it is not all fun and harmless visits to the past.  The librarian tells her that many of the patrons are "needed for something," (p 121), and the proves to be the case for Dally. She also lets slip that sometimes patrons don't make it back....And Dally learns that the library has chosen her to be its next caretaker, which means never going out again through its doors when she assumes this responsibility.  

(me--which is a heck of a lot for a kid to have to contemplate.  Being trapped, even by a really neat library of time-travelling magic, is not what one necessarily wants from life....)

The next secret Dally takes from the shelf sends her back to a pirate ship almost 200 years in the past.  There she befriends the white captain, Eli, and the black first mate, Pete, and Jack, a boy of her own age.  And the secret revealed her is the location of the treasure that was the basis for her family's fortune. 

(me--I was surprised by how long we spent on the pirate ship with not much happening....but it was important that Dally grow to know and care about Eli, Pete and Jack.  And now I'm going into spoiler territory, so you can stop now if you haven't read it).

She meets these people again on her next visit, and this time it becomes clear what she is needed for.  Eli is a woman, and she is pregnant with Pete's child.  Pete has escaped slavery, but is still in danger, and Dally, who is also clearly black, is in danger too.   Dally and Jack (who turns out to be another time traveler, from 1960) are able to help Eli and Pete escape...

Then on her next trip through time, she meets their grandchildren, two grownup brothers, just as one of them breaks the news to the other that he's going to leave the family and pass as white.  Dally puts all the pieces together and realizes that these people she's met in the past are her own family.  And she realizes as well that she doesn't have to go back to her own time...

(me-very big spoiler coming up)

So she doesn't.  She stays with Jack in his own time in the 1960s growing up alongside him, and shows up at the library again, just after she left for the past that one last time, an older woman, ready to take on her role as its librarian. 

(me--and we are asked not to feel bad for her mother, because Dally explains everything, and her mother gets to watch her grow up by time travelling to the past to see it for herself,  Which I didn't find very satisfying from a maternal point of view).

So basically, the time travelling in the story is the mechanism through which we, the readers, see alongside Dally the past of her family, with all its darkness and love mixed together.  And though I certainly found it very readable and very interesting, I also found it frustrating.  Dally is so busy being used to show all this to the reader that she ends up not being all that much of a character in her own right.  

But that being said, I do think that Dally's adventures have great appeal for the target audience!

A Twist in Time, by Jean Ure, for Timeslip Tuesday

A highlight of going to the biennial conference about 20th Century School Girls and Their Books, as I did a few weeks ago, is that there is time set aside for attendees to sell books to each other (I guess giving a talk on 20th century UK time travel books was cool too, but not quite as much fun).  I had jammed packed my bag and the lining of jacket with American books (picked up cheap at library booksales) that I thought I could sell, and I did--taking in money from sales with one hand, and giving it to the woman at the table next to me with the other (nice that her table had more books I wanted than any other one!)

What with this and vigorous visiting of charity shops, I came home with this lovely assortment of books--

--which included today's Timeslip offering, A Twist in Time, by Jean Ure (2000). Several of her books got published in the US as well as in the UK, though not this one, so you may have heard of her....

It's a pleasant, but not remarkable, story.  Cosmia (aka Cosy) has to stay with foster parents while her mother is in hospital (mental health issues).  She finds the two girls fostered there already hard to mesh with--they are louder and brasher than she is, and mock her for her posher accent and for attending a posher school. But she has her own room, and her own table for homework....and sometimes she sees another girl there, writing...a girl who was living through the London Blitz, and who can also see her across time (and who wishes very badly she could help Cosy with her maths homework....Her journal stays on the table for a while after this girl leaves the room, and Cosy learns her name (Kathleen), and the sad circumstance that brought her to this house (parents killed in Blitz).

Everything works out nicely, with Cosy getting a bit of gumption from the other girls, and unexpected support from the older of the two as well.  And her mother gets out of hospital and she meets Kathleen, now quite a bit older, in real life.....

I enjoyed the time slippy part of the story lots. We get to see Kathleen's point of view from her journal, and it was interesting and intriguing to see how each girl thought the other was a ghost, and how they wondered what was happening.

But I only gave it three stars over on Goodreads because in the end this proved to be somewhat pallid time slipping, with no direct communication across the years, which disappointed me. (The closest it came was when Kathleen was able to leave a helpful math note in her journal that was of great assistance to Cosy).  But it was a nice book, very engrossing and easy to read.

(And it was given additional personal interest to me in that my younger son's current girlfriend is also named Cosima, which was the first I'd heard of the name, so it was neat to see it here...and probably, since she is a fine arts major, she isn't great at math either, though I could be doing her an injustice...)

A Storm Without Rain, by Jan Adkins, for Timeslip Tuesday

Life is becoming marginally less crazy, and so I'm back with a Timeslip Tuesday post after my break--A Storm Without Rain, by Jan Adkins (1983).

15 year-old Jack is fed up with his family in a typical teenaged way and skips out on his grandfather's birthday to go out in his boat on Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts.  Napping on a small island, he's caught up in a strange storm without rain, and it transports him back in time to 1904.  Alarmingly, the island where he'd chosen to spend his day out is a leper colony back in the past, and the one boat that passes by refused to take him off it.  So he sets out on a long swim, and comes ashore safely to find temporary work with on a fishing boat.  And that journey brings him back to his own home town, which he both recognizes and find (naturally) strange. 

 He goes to his own house, where his boat-building family take him in, and becomes close friends with the boy who will be his grandfather.  He learns the craft of boat building from his great-grandfather, and has a crush on the girl who's his grandmother.  The threat of being denounced as a leper when the man who found him on the pestilential island provides some tension, as does the constant low thrum of anxiety about getting back to his own time.  

But as time travel goes, it is rather pleasant.  All that is ugly in the past is brushed aside by the wings of the countless sea birds and the teeming fish in the ocean and the curl of wood beneath his chisel as boats are made.  And his family in the past are really lovely and interesting characters.  The surprise introduction of Mark Twain added a spark of interest towards the end, but really nothing much happens.

Sometimes I chaffed at the loving descriptions and lack of critical thinking about the past, but sometimes I really appreciated the cast of characters and the lovely word pictures....but my most powerful takeaway was that I should sharpen my own tools.  The book is basically a love song to Buzzards Bay, and to a lesser extent the art of boat building, so if you are in the mood for a slow moving, dream-like journey to the past (with lots of boats), you will find it pleasing (though it's rather melancholy that the Bay is so much less full of birds and fish than it was, which I feel safe in saying is one of the author's Points).