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).