Costumes for Time Travelers, by A.R. Capetta, for Timeslip Tuesday

Today's Timeslip Tuesday is a YA romance/adventure-Costumes for Time Travelers, by A.R. Capetta.  If you like your time travel full of bopping around to different times, with alternate timelines threatening all the characters hold dear, time tangled romance, and also are a fan of fashions of many eras, and the sewing thereof, this is the book for you!

Calisto has lived their life in Pocket, a peaceful island outside of the river of time.  It's a place where those who time travel visit to acquire what they need for their journeys--the boots that let them pass through the mists into different times, and the clothes they need to blend in with the locals.  Calisto works in their grandmother's shop, helping to make these costumes.  They don't time travel themselves, and they have no particular desire to.

Then Fawkes bursts into Pocket.  He doesn't time travel in planned journeys like everyone else, but bounces in constant motion from one time to the next, both past and future.  And when he sees Calisto, he recognizes them....though this is their first meeting.  Their meeting, however, is just a prelude to a dangerous adventure into the past.  There is a sinister cadre of dangerous men (fascists, Calisto's grandma calls them) who consider time travelers abominations, and who have given up their lives in ordinary time to hunt them down in the mists between times.  And there's another time traveler, whose twisted greed is shaking the stability of times past, and changing the future to come (in a bad way). 

Calisto and Fawkes are (for reasons that make good sense) the only ones in the right places and right times, with the right gifts, to make sure that they have the right time for a future together for themselves and all they hold dear.

I myself really really liked Pocket and the people living there (a diverse group from many times, with interesting backgrounds and professions) and would have enjoyed a simple cozy romance set there with time travel on the side.  I also really liked the crafty bits about making clothes.  I was disappointed when Calisto and Fawkes set out on their adventures (and things got a lot less cozy) but their visits to past and future, and the foiling of the bad guys, were good reading too.  

Unfortunately, the big heavy hitting ideas skittering on the edges of the story never quite emerged fully enough to add heart-ripping gravitas to the adventures, and the bad guy trouncing of the ending was lacking in tension or heart-pulling emotion. It remained for me a bouncy adventure, and not much more.