Halfway Down Paddy Lane, by Jean Marzollo, for Timeslip Tuesday

Halfway Down Paddy Lane, by Jean Marzollo (1981), is the story of 15-year-old Kate, a girl from the early 1980s, who travels back in time to 1850--same Massachusetts town, same house even, but now she's the oldest girl in a family of Irish immigrant mill workers.  Fortunately she's able to do a convincing Irish accent, and she quickly picks up the ability to work in a textile factory.  Even more quickly, she falls in love with Patrick, who is the oldest son in her new family, and the focus of Kate's thoughts shift from "how do I survive this?" (which is very interesting and well done)  to "how can I marry Patrick?"  (less interesting).

But fate has other plans for Patrick, and Kate finds her self back in the 1980s, broken hearted.

I know this is a favorite time travel story for many, and I would have loved this if I'd read it the year it was published (I was a high school freshman then).  The romance (with enough explicit details about nipples and manly bulges to push this to YA)  would have been just right for young me, and I'd have learned a lot of history (the No-Nothing Party, the Yankee prejudice against the Irish, and what life was like as a mill worker).  

As a much older reader, I appreciated the history (though it wasn't new to me) but found the romance kind of icky and not believable. What bothered me more is that Kate didn't do much with her time in the past, but just passively went with the flow of it all, too obsessed with Patrick to be a real part of her new family, and more and more convinced that she'll just stay in the past forever (she does miss her parents, but Patrick is her bright shinning sun).  Right at the end, she does decide to become involved in the struggles of the mill workers, but doesn't get a chance to do anything before going back to her own time.  

The time travel is never explained directly, but it turns out that Patrick is her great-great-grandfather, and the house Kate's mother has just bought in the present is the same one that Patrick and his family lived in.  So kinship and over-lapping in the same house converged into time travel, which is as good a reason for time travel as any, I guess....though not pushed by the author into anything truly magical.  It felt kind of pointless.  Kate didn't change anything in the past (except souring Patrick's relationship with the girl he ended up marrying), and her return to the present is so brief there's no sense of Kate having changed (she just cries about Patrick).

All in all, a bit disappointing; I felt no particular sense of numinous magic or stirring of emotion, which is what I read timeslip stories for. But at 14, my take on it may well have been very different indeed.  I might even have ended up crushing on Patrick myself....