The Sea of Always (Thirteen Witches #2), by Jodi Lynn Anderson, for Timeslip Tuesday

 

Yay me!  I have my Timeslip Tuesday book read--The Sea of Always (Thirteen Witches #2), by Jodi Lynn Anderson.   It's the second book in the series, and though it does a decent job standing alone, it  works better if you've read the first, and there's no reason why you wouldn't want to start at the beginning!  It has a totally unique time travel premise, as one of the characters points out:

"There have got to be lots of possible futures.  The time-travelling whales make that possible." (p 215). 

 Yes, here we have a time-travelling whale, who's graciously conveying our heroine, the young witch hunter Rosie, her best friend Germ, the ghost of a young boy, and another young witch hunter from the future, on an impossible quest through time and space.  The kids are desperately trying to save Rosie's twin brother, stolen at birth by the Time Witch, and, while they're at it, it would be really nice if they could foil the evil plot of the Time Witch and the other witches to destroy all that is good in the world.

Rosie's witch-hunting skills are still a work in progress, the witches are incredibly powerful, and the whale unpredictable.  And the Time Witch has set a clock ticking that will end Rosie's life if she doesn't win her brother back.  She can't directly confront the witches all at once, so she set off, with her companions, to steal their hearts, one by one, to destroy en masse when time runs out.

It's a desperate game of chance against horrible odds, but with determination and love, there's hope....

So the journey hunting witches, via the magical whale that transports them through the Sea of Always, is full of fun/disturbing time travel.  Fun because it's time travel, disturbing because the witches are really horrible.  The whale is perhaps the most entertaining part of the story though--it provides the characters with all the comforts and distractions it can, producing party decorations, snacks, music, and the like.  

The main strengths of the book are the vivid pictures it creates in the mind's eye, and in Rosie's inner journey--I really liked her character development.  In particular, it's great to see her, encouraged by her friends, embracing the weirdness of her imagination that makes her magic powerful.   

On the downside, with twelve witches to hunt down (the 13th was dispatched in the first book), there's a lot of travelling through time and place, during which the kids are primarily spectators of the past, and though I found it interesting, there may well be readers who will find it frustrating that there are no Big Happenings and Wild Excitement.  And I found the ending something of a let down--there's a bit of deus ex machina involved that saves the day, without which the kids would have been doomed, and all the hard work of heart stealing didn't, in the end, seem as worthwhile as I was assuming it would be.  

There's a third book coming, so of course not everything is resolved at the end of this one....I will look forward to it, even though it will probably not have time travelling whales!