Lark and the Wild Hunt, by Jennifer Adam, for Timeslip Tuesday

I am always very appreciative when fate works in my favor, and I'm happily reading a middle grade fantasy I'd been looking forward to and it turns out to be a timeslip book and I finish it on a Tuesday! So today for Timeslip Tuesday I offer  Lark and the Wild Hunt, by Jennifer Adam (July 2022, HarperCollins).

Lark has grown up along the border of the Fae world, helping her mother raise strange, part Fae, shadowy horses that carry the human riders who are brave enough to join the Wild Hunt each year.  She's watched her brother, her sister, and her mother ride off  in the grand company of the Winter King of the Fae, following the White Stag along the boundary between worlds and driving back Fae who are trespassing on the human side.  But one hunt goes horrible wrong, and Lark's brother doesn't come back.

Lark is determined to bring her brother home.  First she must trust the Fae boy and his raven, who set her to work assembling a mysterious silver timepiece, while the border starts to fray and the land of the Fae falls under the rule of the malignant Briar King.  And then she must cross into the land of the Fae herself, pitting her wits against the entrapments and entanglements the King throws her way, to save not just her brother, but balance between the realms...

It is a good story, but a long one--480 pages, and I feel it could have been condensed somewhat, with a tighter focus on getting from one plot point to the next.  That being said, although I didn't read it in a single sitting, and it took a week of dipping in to it to finish, there were always beats to the story that kept my interest going, the atmosphere and growing tension were great, and the final obstacle that Lark has to overcome was excellent.  All the details hang together, many vivid descriptions stick in my mind, and I was also, of course, interested in the silver timepiece.  

It turns out that the flow of time doesn't work in the land of the Fae, and only time slipping in from the human world allows change to happen there.  Which would have been time slippish enough for my Tuesday purposes, but Lark also is able to use the device at a key moment in the story to actually go back in time.  I was pleased.

Give this to dreamy kids already hooked on fantasy....10 year old me, untrammeled by the outside world, would probably have loved it.

The Time-Traveling Fashionista and Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile, by Bianca Turetsky, for Timeslip Tuesday

The Time-Traveling Fashionista and Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile (The Time-Traveling Fashionista #3) by Bianca Turetsky (2013), fell victim to the fate that many books I actually buy--once I own a book I paid for, it's so easy for me to feel no urgency to actually read it.  But now I have (yay!) and it can go join the first to books in this fun middle grade series on my time travel bookshelf.

Louise, a young fashionista, has already travelled back twice in time, thanks to the mysterious Traveling Fashionista Vintage Sale (by invitation only).  She's tried on two dresses, one which took her to the Titanic and one which took her to the court of Marie Antoinette.  This time she slips into a lavender Grecian gown, and is plunged into the life of Cleopatra--with a twist.  She's now a worker in the costume crew for the epic Hollywood movie, staring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton!  But then she finds a necklace with a gorgeous pearl, and illicitly tries it on....and travels back in time again.

Now she's in the court of the real Cleopatra, a young woman fighting for power...and for her life.  Threats are everywhere, and soon Louise, now one of Cleopatra's handmaids, is wondering if she herself will make it home alive.  This isn't a time period I know all that much about, so I found nothing in the history to nitpick, and learned more about it in that graceful, pleasant way one learns history from reading fiction!

This is fairly easy time travel--Louise has an identity to fill in each different time, so language isn't an issue,  and although she has to keep her wits about her so as not to display her ignorance, she manages to muddle along well enough for her secret to be safe. 

It's a good story, with the magic of the time travel balanced by Louise's pragmatic thoughts. There's a touch of middle school angst in her real time that makes Louise seem very real and relatable...perhaps the bravest thing she does is to wear her vintage fashions to school.  

Something that really make these book stand out are the lovely illustrations by Sandra Suy-lovely dresses in particular!  And  of course the audience who will love this series most are the girls like Louise whose creativity uses fashion to flourish. This would not be me, but still I enjoyed them, and if there had been a fourth I would happily read it!

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The Glen Beyond the Door, by Meta Mayne Reid, for Timeslip Tuesday

A few weeks ago I joined a new Goodreads Group--"Forgotten Vintage Children's Lit We Want Republished!" and Meta Mayne Reid was one of the authors mentioned.  I'd never heard of her, and when I saw she wrote at least one time travel book, I was intrigued.  Fortunately I'd just earned an Amazon gift card with gas points (yay (?) for the high price of gas) that covered the cost of The Glen Beyond the Door (1968), and I was very excited to read it.  

Lisa's parents have just moved from Belfast to her grandfather's old home after his death.  She's recovering from polio, which has left her with a weak leg.  Soon her cousin Andrew comes to stay--his parents are off in America, and he's basically been dumped on them.  She's thrilled by the idea of having an almost brother, but Andrew is miserable.  Then, up in the attic of the house, where one wall is wood that burned in a fire centuries ago, the two kids find time travel magic.  

Together they explore the history of their family home, from the Stone Age up to the arrival of the Planters from Scotland, who took the Irish land for their own.  Each visit to the past gives them not just food for thought and wonder, but strengthening gifts--literally a stronger leg for Lisa, and a dog for Andrew, but Andrew is also helped make it through the bewildering mix of sadness and anger he's feeling.  And they are left with a tight connection to their family's home, where Planters and native Irish blended their lives together, and Andrew becomes officially welcomed into Lisa's family.

The time travel is the somewhat distant sort, in which the modern kids are mostly spectators, overlapping into kids from the past, but not changing what happened.  This made it feel more like a history lessons than part of a whole story (and I much prefer time travelers with independent volition), but it was not without interest.  Both the events of the past and the reactions of Lisa and Andrew were good (though not great) reading.  Andrew's present day emotional turmoil take center stage more forcefully than the past does, and although this too was good reading I was a little disappointed that Lisa becomes a secondary character.  

What I really liked was the layered past of this bit of Northern Ireland--there was a lovely sense of place.

So although I read it happily, and have added another of Reid's more affordable books, The McNeils at Rathcapple) to my Amazon cart, it might be a while before I use my hard won gas rewards points, Bing rewards, and Swagbucks gift cards for it.  I can actually afford to buy myself books with real grown-up money (and use this for new books), but I try not spend my wages on vintage books, because if it is too easy to buy them, I might well start buying too many.....and that way lies madness and penury.

See You Yesterday, by Rachel Lynn Solomon for Timeslip Tuesday

See You Yesterday, by Rachel Lynn Solomon (YA, May 2022, Simon and Schuster) is a very entertaining and rather moving ground-hog day sort of time slip story.  It's Barrett Bloom's first day of college, and she is eager to put the heavy weight of high school behind her, and start afresh.  But she wakes up to find that she has a new room-mate--a girl she was once friends with in high school, who turned into an enemy.  And her day doesn't get any better--humiliated by Miles, a smart aleck boy in Physics class, flubbing her chance to get a position on the college newspaper, and culminating with setting a frat on fire.  Not the first day she wanted....but it isn't her only chance.

When she wakes up the next day, it is the first day all over again.  And Barrett can't do anything about it but try to do better (and successfully avoid the frat fire).  Then Miles seeks her out--he has also been stuck in a repeating first day loop, in his case for weeks already, and he's glad to have a potential ally in figuring out how to get unstuck.  Gradually Barrett and Miles, thrown together day after the same day, start to appreciate and trust each other, taking advantage of their situation to seize the day and do all sorts of fun and whacky stuff (like treating all 15 dogs in the shelter to a grand day out, wildly spending money on adventures and free ice cream for everyone on campus, and more).  And gradually they open up to each other, sharing their secrets and past traumas.  And as day follows the same day, they fall in love....learning each other, delighting in each other, treasuring each other.

But if time starts flowing like it should again, will their love last?

There's lots to like here.  Barrett isn't a standard sexy YA heroine--she's plus sized, abrasive, prickly, and impulsive.  A lot of the prickly and abrasive part comes from the trauma of her high school experience, which includes a really horrible episode in which the guy who asks her to prom, and then has (consensual, though not great) sex with her, turns that into a public humiliation nightmare for her. She wants to be someone different, but it turns out that Miles loves her for who she is, and she is just the right person to pull him out of his reserve into the flow of life and laughter. Barrett is Jewish, and Miles is Japanese Jewish, and their shared Jewish-ness is a part of their growing relationship, and Barret's mom is about to marry her girlfriend, which also makes this story have a nice outside the standard mold taste to it.

But mostly the fun and interest comes from Barrett and Miles making each new/same day different and extraordinarily, days in which they are able to grow and change.

I'm not sure it needed to be over 400 pages long, but I am sure that YA readers who want entertaining cute and introspection-provoking romance will not care.

A nice time travel touch was Barrett and Miles seeking out a physics professor who was basically forced to resign after her high level course on Time Travel outraged parents.  She wasn't able to give them a magic solution, but did nudge them toward the exit point of their loops, and I liked how the time travel was neither entirely fantastical or entirely scientific, but a bit of both.  I also liked the lost sock that was an important key to it all....lost socks are powerful, mysterious entities!

 

Hello Now, by Jenny Valentine, for Timeslip Tuesday

 Although it's not always obvious (and doesn't always work) I do sometimes try to plan ahead and make sure I have time travel books read and ready to review on Tuesdays.  So I placed lots of holds last week, and have just finished one of them--Hello Now, by Jenny Valentine.  At about page 100, slightly more than halfway through, it started seeming familiar....and I checked Goodreads, and found I'd read it before.  Not very long before, either--February of 2021.  I wrote of the book then "Not to my personal taste."  And this conclusion still stands.  

What follows is a presentation of why it's not to my personal taste, as opposed to a nuanced, critical and level-headed review.  I'm going to spoil the story, so if you want to go read a book I don't really like without being spoiled off you go!

It's a story of a teenager, Jude (gender never specified), disgruntled at their mother for constantly choosing to move new places when things turn sour.  Another new house, another new town, although this one comes comes with an old man, Henry, living it, which is new  This was interesting; I enjoy people exploring old houses and Henry seemed like he had potential as a character (though I hadn't remembered at this point I'd read the book before).

Then Jude's life is transformed when a magical boy, Novo, who transcends time and space and the laws of physics (literally) appears on the scene (here's another personal thing--I thought the name Novo was silly).  It's basically him appearing, being all magical pied piper (babies stop crying when he smiles on them, etc.) and saying "hi I'm your magical soul mate come transcend the laws of time and space with me" and Jude going yes and being transcended into a pocket universe bubble of space time.  This was odd, and not very interesting, because Novo showed no signs of having any particular character trait other than being mesmerizing, and Jude had no thoughts that weren't about him.  I did not remember reading about Novo a year and a half ago.

Then Jude and Novo are in  their own little bubble of a private Now and it is heady, so heady, with love and lots of description.  Good description of cliff diving, but generally not very interesting to me, except I wondered why Jude wasn't surprised that they both suddenly had wetsuits.  Where did they get wetsuits? If Novo's magicness conjured them, why not conjure more things? Why stop at wetsuits?

We switch back to Henry for a bit, and he does have character and a backstory....and a sad love story of his own (this is where I started remembering!) Turns out he was a being like Novo, who also fell transcendently for a regular mortal, and instead of being content to spend what time  he could with her in a space time bubble, he stuck around until she got old and died, and ended up being trapped in an undying aged body with no ability to flow through doors of time and space anymore. Moderately interesting. 

In any event, Jude decides to keep Novo from getting stuck like that, and good byes are hard but Jude goes off travelling courtesy of Henry's squirreled away wealth and dispassionately observes people and places with no interesting thoughts about them (Jude's main thought is "good for me I'm not home on the couch"), almost as if the  Novo experience fried their brain with transcendentness.

Novo is back in an in-between space finding to find another door to go through.

But anyway, time is certainly slippery, and I've now written a blog post.

In fairness--if you like books with lots of description (nicely written description; it does make good pictures in the mind), that's full of Feelings and Young Love, you might love this.  The Kirkus reviewer liked it more than I did:  "The author deftly handles themes of living in the moment, embracing change, and moving forward after loss. While the conclusions drawn don’t necessarily break new ground, readers will nevertheless walk away with a lot to think about."  

I am still thinking about wetsuits, and how unromantic they are both to put on and take off.....

The Button Box, by Bridget Hodder and Fawzia Gilani-Williams for Timeslip Tuesday

The Button Box, by Bridget Hodder and Fawzia Gilani-Williams (April 2022, Kar-Ben Publishing), is a lovely time travel story for upper elementary/younger middle grade readers (which is to say 8-10 year olds).  It entertains, it educates, it offers wisdom and promotes tolerance, and it has a cat...

Fifth grade is turning sour for Ava, who's Jewish, and her cousin Nadeem, who's Muslim, when a classmate starts bulling them about their religions.  When they tell their Grandma, instead of picking up the phone to talk to the principle, she tells a story about one of their Sephardic ancestors in 8th century North Africa, a girl named Ester whose family are spice merchants.  And she brings out a crystal button box, full of buttons cherished for generations.  Granny's cat, Sheba, somehow triggers its magic, and one of the buttons takes Ava and Nadeem back to Ester's time....

The two modern kids are recognized as the cousins whose visit was expected, and the time-travel magic provides them with appropriate clothes and language skills, so although they are a bit anxious about getting home again, it's not traumatic.  They are pretty sure that there's going to be something they have to do in the past, and sure enough, there is.

The Umayyad dynasty who ruled Syria has been overthrown, and one of the only surviving princes, Abdur Rhaman, aka Abd al-Rahman, is running for his life.  He's desperately trying to get to Spain, just a few miles across the water.  Ava and Nadeem know that he is responsible for a Golden Age where science and art flourishes, and Muslims, Jews, and Christians live peacefully together.  But from where they are standing in North Africa, with an mob trying to capture the prince to claim the bounty on his life, this future seems like it might never happen, which would mean that Ava and Nadeem were never born.

But Ester has a plan to save him, and Ava and Nadeem are in the right place at the right time to help her....

And as an added bonus for the two kids, Abdur Rhaman is able to share wisdom with them that will help them with their modern bully, and they in turn are able to give him the assurance he will need to lead his kingdom.

The past is vividly described, and I very pleasurably learned an important bit of history I was never taught (I have now done a lot of  further online reading and have quickly planned a trip to Andalusia, Spain).   It very thoughtfully offers a view of Islam and Judaism that's respectful and heartfelt, and holds wisdom for the receptive reader without being dogmatic or preachy. And it does all this in only 129 pages.

Please give this to the kid who has just outgrown the Magic Tree House books after reading them all, whose mind is ready to be stretched a bit! Or any other 8 or 9 year old you happen to have around.  Or if you are an adult willing to appreciate a book that might at first seem to young for you but actually isn't, give it a try!  

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The Prince of Nowhere, by Rochelle Hassan, for Timeslip Tuesday

I feel a little bad that by making it clear that The Prince of Nowhere, by Rochelle Hassan (May 2022, HarperCollins), is a time slip book, I've spoiled it a little. But it can't be helped, and so I will bravely move on and try to explain what the book is about and why I liked it lots (in a nutshell, great world-building, great characters, a chilling moral dilemma) without spoiling it too much more!

Roda has lived a safe, snug life with her mother in a small town that's protected by an curtain of enchanted, freezing cold mist.  Her adventurous aunt Dora has ventured beyond the mist, travelling through monster-filled lands to other towns, each likewise engirdled, and even to other lands, and Roda dreams of maybe someday following in her footsteps. But adventure finds her first.

Anonymous riddling notes begin to arrive, each with a small prediction about the future that always comes true. So when a note comes instructing her to venture almost inside the mist to find a crow, she does...and brings the almost frozen crow home. It isn't an ordinary crow, but a shapeshifting boy named Ignis, whose clan has just been destroyed by monsters.

Ignis has no home anymore, and doesn't know what he was doing before he crashed in the mist. The anonymous note writer does, though, and has just set a plan in motion that will take Roda and Ignis on an impossible, irrational journey through the mist, through the monsters, to a place called Nowhere.

Nowhere is a pocket universe place, created by the same long-gone magician that set the protective mist in place, that can only be entered, and left, during the three days a great comet passes by. It also is a time portal, where Anonymous is waiting. When Ignis realizes this, he desperately wants to go back in time to save his clan, but Roda is convinced this is a mistake. The trust they've built up in their travels is threatened, as is the course of their lives, and the clock is ticking as the comet passes by...Will they be trapped in Nowhere before it comes around again? Will they be caught in a looping time slip for decades? And what does Anonymous, who (in the words of the Goodreads blurb) "threatens their past, present, and future," want from them?

It is a cracking good read--lots of good build up to the adventure, an exciting journey, a truly magical and wonderous and disturbing destination (I cannot stress enough how fascinating Nowhere is), and a really intriguing high-stakes puzzle. The author tried really hard to make the time travel elements understandable, but it still required careful thought and I'm not quite sure I firmly grasped all that preceded this episode of a story that had been playing out for years. This did not trouble me overmuch, though, because I was happily reading, and cheering for Ignis and Roda to come out of their adventure with their friendship, and futures, intact.  

Recommended to all who like middle grade fantasy (there is also a pinch of dragon, if that sweetens the pot of my recommendation), and to time travel fans who particularly enjoy one of the central conundrums of the genre--if you could go back in time to set things right, would you go?

The ending is self-contained, but there's lots of room for more, and I hope we get it!

The Magical Cupboard, by Jane Louise Curry, for Timeslip Tuesday

I was tremendously pleased when my sister came to visit me this past weekend, bringing with her a copy of The Magical Cupboard, by Jane Louise Curry (1976), which she had cleverly bought for me in a used bookstore along the way.  It's the sequel to Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Time, a classic time travel book that I enjoyed.

Rosemary, the main character of the first book, has only a walk on part here--in the present day of the book, she's anxious to find a magical cupboard that played a part in her first time slipping adventure in 18th century America (at least, I guess the cupboard did, but I don't actually remember it....).  In any event, we soon leave Rosemary to see what's happening in 18th century New England.  

The cupboard, a beautiful thing, with intricate carvings, has been stolen by a nasty preacher and his wife, who have made a living profiting from witch trials and embezzled orphans.  One of these orphans is Felicity, who crawls inside the cupboard one cold night when she's supposed to be keeping watch over the preacher's belongings as they travel west in search of new money making schemes.

Wonderfully, Felicity finds herself in a warm and comfortable room, with strange "dragons" whizzing outside...she doesn't know it, but she's in Rosemary's time.  It is all to brief a visit for my taste, but it does set up events for the cupboard to be returned in the present to the family from which it was stolen.

Much of the book involves the evil schemes of the parson and his wife, and the journey west.  Felicity is a fine orphan, making good and finding love and prosperity after much adversity.  

I enjoyed it, but wish we'd seen more time travel, and more of Rosemary!  

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....

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!

The Root Cellar, by Janet Lunn, for Timeslip Tuesday

The Root Cellar, by Janet Lunn (1983), is a classic Canadian time travel story....and so by rights it should have been featured here long ago.  Thing was, I had it confused with another story about a root cellar and the underground railroad and time travel that I read years and years ago and hadn't much enjoyed....I don't know what that book or mishmash of other books I was thinking of, but it wasn't this one, which it turns out I'd never read before!   (Possible I was just so turned off the the really unattractive original cover I made up a story in my mind and never read any root cellar time travel books....).

In any event, it was a lovely surprise to find myself reading a really good new to me book!

Rose is an orphaned girl,  raised, for a very paltry value of raised, by her grandmother.  She's never been friends with any children, and has never been shown any affection.  When her grandmother dies, she's sent off to live with her aunt and uncle, and their four boys, in an old house in Canada.  The aunt and uncle are well meaning, but they don't have the time and energy to help Rose start healing from her years of neglect, and Rose doesn't feel wanted, and doesn't want to be there.  Then she finds the old root cellar that turns into a gateway to the past.

Back in the 1860s, Rose feels strangely happy.  She's able to make friends with two kids there--Will, the son of the house, and Susan, a servant girl.  Time in the present doesn't pass while she's in the past, but Will and Susan are older when she next visits them.  The Civil War is raging, and Will decides to go off and fight.  When Rose goes back in time again, Will hasn't come home.  So she persuades Susan that they must go look for him, and so ensues a long and arduous journey to the crowded hospitals of Washington D.C., full of the horrors of war....

And that journey helps Rose grow emotionally, can find a place in her own time, with her own family.

It's an engrossing story, and a fascinating one!  Really quality time travel, and a must read for anyone who enjoys stories of children coming to grips with what it means to be a person amongst other people.  Good Civil War history too.

(Home renovation-wise, I'm a bit appalled by the state of the aunt and uncle's house; I would have been almost as horrified as Rose was and I like old houses!  They need to get the walls fixed before winter comes!)

Elsetime, by Eve McDonnell, for Timeslip Tuesday

Elsetime, by Eve McDonnell (June 2020, Everything With Words), is a must read for time travel fans (and a very good read for middle grade fantasy fans, mg historical fiction fans, and so on....). Though it has, to the best of my knowledge, not been published yet here in the US, it's well worth getting your hands on (says one who did so!). I do have a slight caveat though--it's a book that will be most enjoyed by those able to wrap their minds tightly around the sort of twists and turns that so often happen with time travel, and if, like me, you have a tendency to gallop through good stories, you might suddenly find yourself a bit confused...I think I will enjoy it more when I reread it in two or three years!

In London in 1928, 12 year old Glory has lied about here age to get a job in a jewelry shop. She designs beautiful things, but the fact that one of her hands is wooden prosthetic means she can't always bring her creations to fruition. The rather nasty woman she works for is not sympathetic, paying Glory a pittance while profiting off her designs.

In 1864, Needle is desperately trying to keep himself and his mother fed, following in the footsteps of his father who mysteriously disappeared by scrounging in the mud of the Thames for bits and pieces to turn into saleable ornaments. Like his father, Nettle has a magical gift--he can feel the stories of the things he finds. When he finds some metal fragments from 1928, with the names of victims of a horrible flood, he travels in time to that year, determined to give a warning.

There he meets Glory, and their stories intersect. The clock is ticking, and Glory herself might be one of those who will drown...but the two kids are up against villainous characters, and the problems that come with time travel. Fortunately, a very clever crow named Magpie, Nettle's helper from his own time, is a fellow time-traveler, and gives them just the assistance they need to add to their own determination and cleverness. And though Nettle, in the end, returns to his own time, he's changed both his life and Glory's for the better, in a lovely way (and not just by saving Glory's life...).

It's a truly engrossing story of friendship and hardship and creativity, given great tension by the threat of the devastating flood to come (a real event). McDonnell paints vivid pictures and brings her characters beautifully to life. And though the twist at the end didn't quite work for me (see caveat above), because I though one of the characters was perfectly capable of being more helpful earlier on, it was still one I enjoyed lots. Since I love to read about making things, I especially loved the crafting parts of the story, of which there were a generous plenty!

The Mirrorwood, by Deva Fagan, for Timeslip Tuesday

Happy book birthday to the lovely middle grade fantasy, The Mirrorwood (April 12, 2022,  Atheneum Books for Young Readers), by Deva Fagan! What with all the new mg fantasy books this week, and the scramble to get reviews up, I was worried that Timeslip Tuesday would interfere with my plans....happily The Mirrorwood has enough timeslip in it that I can in good conscience count it as today's offering!

Fable's family lives near the impassibly thorny border separating the Mirrorwood, full of dangerous blight magic, from the safe, ordinary world. But blight still gets through, twisting whatever it touches into something impossible. And Fable was touched by it when she was born. She has no face of her own, but must borrow other's faces.... wearing them until they start fading into featureless gray, taking her life force with them. Her family loves her, and share their faces, but she can't go far from their farm, because those who are blighted are feared, and even hunted and killed.

And when a father/daughter blight hunter team sets their sights on her, the only way to escape is to try to get through the thorns into the Mirrorwood, where she had been heading to try to find a way to free herself of her curse. She's accompanied by the daughter, Vycorax, who hadn't been able to killer despite her father's orders. The two girls agree to truce as they set off to explore the world beyond the thorns.

There they find a world lost in a spell, cast by one of the Subtle Powers, the twisty immortals who can grant wishes, or make bargains that could snare the unwary. The people of the Mirrorwood have been trapped in a time loop; every day time resets and they live the day again for the first time. The only people who know of this trap are those who have themselves, like Fable, been blighted. They can see the horrible reality.... but can't do anything to fix it.

Fable and Vycorax are found by one of the Subtle Powers, the wish granter, who tells them how the Mirrorwood came to be cursed. The true prince has been caught by the time warp, and a blighted demon imposter has taken his place. If the demon is killed, the curse will be lifted, but it is an almost impossible task. Which the girls, in true mg fantasy form, set off to undertake regardless.... there really isn't a choice. Fable has made a wish of her own, as well--that she could have her own true face.

And this is where things really get interesting! Not only are the girls moving from enemies to loyal friends, but there's a twist to the whole demon prince thing.... the curse isn't exactly what the Subtle Power told them it was. Lyrian, the demon prince, proves to be a much more complex character than the girls had anticipated...

And also at this point is where I stopped just happily reading along, enjoying the story, and became grimly determined to read faster and faster so that I could see what would happen next! Twists and turns, new characters to meet and learn to care about, depth to the story and more about the darkness that preceded the curse, more impossible questing, riddle and illusions, alongside growth in Fable's character.

There's also an increase in the tension of the time warp; it's concentrated inside the castle, where instead of a day, those at the heart of the curse have only seconds of life repeating endlessly, those just outside have minutes or hours, not necessarily nice ones (one bit of this was immensely powerful, driving home the horror of what had happened.

It's clearly a riff on Sleeping Beauty, and it will please fans of reworked fairy tales just fine, but it's more than a reimagining; it's its own thing.  A lovely, gripping thing, with a strong message that it's what's inside that really counts.  Fable realizes that she is still her true self, no matter what her face is, and Vycorax learns that she can make her own choices, and not be bound to her single-minded killer of a father.  People who look like monsters aren't necessarily bad, and the converse as well.  

And as an added bonus, Fable's lovely cat, with whom she can speak, is along for the ride as well! 

The ending is satisfactory, making this a stand-alone, but I'd love to return to the Mirrorwood for more. Partly because it's such a wonderfully strange place, and partly because I'd like to see if the glimmerings of attraction between Fable and Vycorax, and a little between Fable and Lyrian, come to anything....I can't decide which I'd prefer!

short answer: I truly enjoyed it!

disclaimer: review copy received from the author, and deposited by the delivery person in shrubbery next to a door I don't use, so I was very glad I found it safely after who knows how long!

Black Was the Ink, by Michelle Coles, for Timeslip Tuesday

A sub-genre of time travel books that I quite like (becuase I like learning things) uses the time travelling to frame a history lesson.  Black Was the Ink, by Michelle Coles (November 2nd 2021 by Lee & Low Books) is one of these; it is a brilliant lesson on the Reconstruction-- the years immediately after the Civil War when black men were elected to congress, the first Civil Rights Act was signed into law, and KKK murderers were brought to trial and found guilty.  Not much talked about in school history class, and  tremendously well presented here.  

Malcolm, a black teenager, was almost shot playing basketball with his friends in Washington D.C. in 2015, and then almost arrested by the police who came to investigate.  His mother, scared for him, sends him down to Mississippi to stay with his dad's family for the summer (his dad was killed by the police a while before this story begins).  There he finds the diary of his ancestor, Cedric, who worked for many of the black representatives to Congress, recording the triumphs they achieved, the horrors being inflicted on black people in the south by the KKK, and the ultimate failure of Reconstruction to establish lasting equality.  

But Malcom isn't just reading words on the pages.  Cedric brings him literally back in time, and Malcom lives bits of Cedric's life.  He sees horrible tragedies, that amplify the ongoing horrors of the present day.  And Malcom emerges from the experience galvanized to take up the fight that Cedric had been part of, starting by trying to save the family farm, Cedric's farm, from being lost to a highway expansion project (which turns out to be the main reason Cedric is manifesting himself...) 

The heavy weight of the past is lightened somewhat by time with family and by Malcom's nascent relationship with a neighbor girl, but it is a past that is much too heavy for lifting to be possible.  It is not a fast easy read, but it sure is an important one.  The author doesn't do much in the way of condensing the history, which is makes it thorough and very real, but it does make for hard going at times. I can't help but feel it could have been just as powerful without quite so many long speeches from the politicians, while being appreciative of those speeches as important parts of history. 

That being said, Malcolm is an engaging character, and his believable teen self does a pretty good job carrying the narrative along. It takes him a while to get used to being Cedric, and it requires some suspension of disbelief that he carries that role off as well as he does when back in the past (although this was one of my favorite aspects of the book, time travel fan that I am).  And there are joyous moments of family and friendship, and lots of good food, that cheer the reader on.

Still, as a whole, it's a pretty devastating read (though the ending is hopeful), but so important and timely....

side note: speaking as someone who works for a state historic preservation office-- sadly, even if a property is listed in the National Register of Historic Places (which is a lot more time-consuming and tricky than is the case even for the conditional determination of eligibility which Malcolm achieves through a single afternoon's work) it can be bulldozed.  So I ended the story less optimistically than Malcolm does...there's going to be a struggle ahead.

disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher

Out of Time, by Peter Lerangis, for Timeslip Tuesday

I just this minute finished Out of Time (Throwback #3) by Peter Lerangis, this week's Timeslip Tuesday book...I am not very good at keeping my own personal time well managed, and am always scrambling to do what needs doing.  In this case, the scrambling to finish the book (155 pages to go an hour ago) was actually very easy, since I was nicely absorbed.  It was certainly nothing compared to the desperate scramblings through time of the two main characters!

This is the third book of a series about a kid from New York, Corey, who finds out he's a time traveler, like his grandfather (there are more time travelers around than one would think...), as told in Throwback. Corey turns out to be a one of a kind time traveler, though--he can alter the past.  And so he does.  In the second book of the series (The Chaos Loop), he traveled to Germany right at the end of WW II to save his great uncle...but in doing so, he changed the past by keeping his grandparents from meeting, and so he was never born. The Corey who time travelled makes it back to his own present day in New York....but changed into a wolf.

His best friend, Leila (another time-traveler), is the only one who remembers the Corey who no longer belongs in the current time line, and she's determined to help him figure out how to become himself again.  They find help from a secret society of time travelers, who are able to take the gene that gives Corey his unique ability and transfer it to her.  Now the two of them, wolf and girl, head back to the cold winter at the end of Nazi Germany, hoping to give Corey's grandparents their chance to meet, while still keeping his great-uncle alive....

It is tremendously tense!  Wolf Corey's health is failing (a side effect of his situation), and Leila isn't certain she can change the past...but it all works out in the end, mostly thanks to Leila's bravery.

I didn't register it at the time of my reading, but the secret society of time travelers, which includes "trackers" who can tell when the past has been changed, shouldn't really want to be able to create other's with Corey's gift--they are creating for themselves the problem of altered realities that they are contending with (unless Corey and Leila are responsible for them all)....but no matter.  The story at hand is well worth reading regardless!

Time travel-wise, not only to we get to go back to Nazi Germany, but we also get a solo trip by Leila to witness the building of Central Park, and learn a bit of its history, which was very interesting.  

short answer--a solid series, that I can easily imagine middle grade kids loving!

Thirty Talks Weird Love, by Alessandra Narváez Varela, for Timeslip Tuesday

Thirty Talks Weird Love, by Alessandra Narváez Varela (January 1st 2021 by Cinco Puntos Press), is a stunning book, combining a vividly real slice of life story of a girl on the brink of suicide with time travel, set in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico in the 1990s, when girls  are being murdered with horrible, terrifying regularity.

Thirteen-year-old Anamaria is academically driven, and has messed up being a friend.  Lonely and stressed, and scared by the terror stalking her city, she's at a breaking point.  Though her parents love her and care about her well-being, they have no idea how bad things are getting.  There is someone who knows, though--Anamaria's thirty-year-old self, who come back to get her younger self through this bad time.

Anamaria is understandably unwelcoming, and doesn't want to hear what this stranger tries to tell her.  But "Thirty" is able to nudge her, changing enough of the time line to make things better for her past self, but failing in the other task she had travelled through time to set right.

Though this is a  hybrid verse/paragarph novel, and there aren't lots and lots of words, Varela manages to convey an astoundingly vivid and rich picture of Anamaria's thoughts, her daily life, and her experiences at school.  I'm not sure I've ever used the word "masterful" in a review before, but I shall do so now--this is a masterful story.  It twists the heart something fierce.

The time travel part is strange, and never explained (which is a tad frustrating), but very interesting.  Thirty is not a dea ex machina, but she is able to push in just the right places to get Anamaria on a healthier path--mostly, and most importantly for young depressed readers, by getting her to tell her parents that she is depressed and needs help.   It was satisfying, as a Time Travel pureist, to read in the epilogue that briefly lays out what happens to Anamaria in the following years, that she doesn't in fact time travel again--her other self had changed enough so this was no longer necessary.

One of the things that made this such a believable book is that Anamaria thinks in both English and Spanish, and so there is considerable untranslated Spanish in the text.  I don't speak Spanish, but context and generic familiarity were enough to understand what was being said.  And, on the subject of this being clearly a Mexican book, one of the things that made it a viscerally appealing reading experience was all the delicious food!  Though Anamaria is prone to unhealthy comfort eating (so relatable), food is still integral to her loving relationship with her parents (who have a small restaurant)  and with the coffee shop owner next door, a loving uncle figure.

The title, "Thirty Talks Weird Love," refers to Thirty's main message that Anamaria must find a way to love herself, but it's not heavy handed or preachy.  I can imagine many 11-14 year-olds really seeing themselves in this one, and quite possibly being not just entertained by a good story, well told, but helped to be more compassionate to themselves and to others.  

The book is being marketed as YA, but I do think it counts as upper middle grade just as much--a 13-year-old with friendship drama is more middle grade to me than a 14-year-old with relationship drama would be.

Highly recommended.

disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher

Operation Do-over, by Gordon Korman, for Timeslip Tuesday

I often wonder what it would be like to slip through time and be my 12-year-old self again....I will buy apple stock with my babysitting money, avoid the fashionable trends of the 1980s, and excel academically by actually applying myself...Unlike me, the hero of Operation Do-over, by Gordon Korman (January 18th 2022 by Balzer & Bray/Harperteen), has rather higher, more personal, stakes in mind when he does in fact bounce from being 17 back to being 12 again....

Mason and Ty were the best of friends, as close as it is possible for two twelve year old boys to be.  But then new kid Ava arrives at their school, they both crush on her hard, and she unwittingly destroys their friendship when she picks Mason....even when they are 17, the wound is still raw, and leads to trouble that gets Mason expelled from school.

Then, bang.  A car accident sends Mason back in time, and now he is 12 again, still remembering the original time-line.  Knowing what went wrong last time, can he save his friendship with Ty? (and while he's at it, his dog from a fatal encounter with a Rotter-rooter truck, and his parents' marriage?)  

It is not the deepest time-travel story in the world, but not without interest and entertainment.   Mason #2 decides to shake his life up by joining the football team (and as one of the top geeky nerds of the school, the others being Ty and Clarisse, a girl whose been their third wheel for year).  This is a shocker to everyone, and leads to some quite funny football bits).  It hits one main bulls eye of the middle grade experience--friendships of childhood strained by adolescence, and the whole exploration of other possibilities and identities will ring true to the target audience.  

I would have preferred it, I think, from a time travel perspective, if Mason had lived out the entirety of his new timeline; instead, he gets another blow to the head that shoots him back to being 17 again, and it's rather abrupt--17 the second time around is a mix of the original timeline and difference from his being 12 a second time, and the reader is presented with this rather abruptly.  I would have liked more time exploring this, but I realize this isn't the point of the book....

In any event, it's fun, fast read, and its easy to imagine kids liking it lots, though as an adult, it mostly evokes even more reflections on what a do-over like this would involve for oneself....

The Amber Crane, by Malve von Hassell, for Timeslip Tuesday

 

In The Amber Crane, by Malve von Hassell (YA, Odyssey Books, June 2021), a boy from the 17th century and a girl from the 20th cross paths in a moving story of war and perseverance.  (content warning--there is a rape in the book)

Peter was born in Pomerania (on the Baltic coast, an area now split between Poland and Germany) just a few years into the thirty years war.  Now a teenager, apprenticed to a master amber worker, war is all he's ever known.  The armies of both sides have left a land full of refugees and memories of the dead, including Peter's older brother.  Peter feels he can't compete with the shadow of his dashing brother, and his home, where his merchant father is on the verge of bankruptcy and his younger sister, Effie, is not like other girls--she is nonverbal, and non-neurotypical.  And, soon after the book begins, she is raped and retreats even further away from other people.  Peter is distressed but feels powerless to fix anything, and so he visits home infrequently.  In his master's house, he has a place dreaming of being a journeyman, and working to make beautiful things of amber...the amber that washes ashore on the beaches that the powerful Guildmaster's have closed so that no-one can gather amber for themselves.  

But one day, Peter, discouraged by life, wanders out onto the beach and finds two pieces of amber that call to him.  And in defiance of the laws, he claims them, and starts, in the dark of night, to work them.  One becomes a heart for Effie to wear (the amber is known to have healing properties).  In the other, he sees a crane, and starts to set it free.  

Magically, mysteriously, the amber sends Peter forward in time, where he meets a girl, a bit older than him, caught in her own war, WW II.  Lioba is desperately travelling west ahead of the advancing Russian army, trying to make it back to her parent's home.   His visits don't last long, but they are frequent enough so that he becomes invested in her journey, and all the while he is working on the amber crane....

Lioba's story is, for the first two thirds of the book, much more interesting that Peter's, but when Effie is accosted at a rare outing by the man who raped her, Peter takes action and attacks her assailant.  The amber heart Effie wears is revealed and makes her the object of suspicion.  She's accused of being a witch, and Peter is held for assault, and it is just as interesting as Lioba's increasingly hopeless quest to escape to a place where she can follow her own dreams.

Time travel-wise, this is great.  Peter's reactions to the future ring true, and despite the circumstances, make for diverting reading, and the amber crane is a satisfactory bridge between the two time periods.  Character-wise it is harder to call great, because Peter is not a very charismatic lead; he's not a Doer, and he's rather self-absorbed, so it's hard at first to care much about him.  He gets a romance, but it didn't feel quite earned.  Lioba, seen only in brief vignettes, is appealing, but her story remains secondary.  

Where the book felt weak to me was with regards to the historical setting.  If you go into this book knowing very little about the Thirty Years War, you will leave it not knowing much more.  Yes, it's in character for Peter not to be thinking much about the bigger picture, but I wanted more about the context for what was happening in his world.  The root cause of it was a religious struggle--Catholic vs Protestant, but religion barely registers in Peter's pov.  It made him feel kind of dead to the world.  I also wanted more geography; I knew it was on the Baltic Coast, but it still felt unrooted in place.  There is a glossary at the end that includes some background,  I wish it had been integrated into the story.

By the halfway point, I was absorbed in the story, and closed it with a sense of having read a good book, and as someone who loves reading about the making of things, I very much appreciated the amber-working, but it still fell just a bit short of what I'd hoped it would be.

The Secret World of Polly Flint, by Helen Cresswell, for Timeslip Tuesday

Cutting it close to the wire this week, but I managed to get a timeslip story read-The Secret World of Polly Flint, by Helen Cresswell (middle grade, 1982, Puffin).  It's one that's been on my tbr heap for ages, too, which is Progress!

Polly is an imaginative only child of a coal miner father who's sympathetic to her sense of magic in the world (he is a great father, playing rhyming games with her, and with a keen awareness of the importance of a mind that can fly free).  Her mother is also a good mother, but much more practical.  They are happy...till the accident down in the mines that leaves her dad unable to walk.  The family must move to their aunt's house when he gets out of the hospital...and her aunt, stiff and set in her ways, is not fun to live with.

But her house is near a large park land with a beautiful lake.  And Polly learns that there was once an older village, that slipped down and away through the net of time and was lost.  As she explores the park and the margins of the lake, Polly hears children she cannot see, and on Sundays she can here the sound of the church bells rising up from the lost village below.

Finally, she meets some of the lost villagers ("time gypsies" as they call themselves)--a raggedy old woman, a man, a baby, and a boy about her own age (though centuries older, of course).  The villagers out of time can visit, unseen to everyone one but Polly, and return through a tunnel across the lake to their own place.  But something goes wrong, and the little group gets stuck in real world time.  Polly has to help figure out how to getting home...without coming unstuck in time herself.

The book started just lovely, with its sensitive heroine attuned to wonder, and the haunting story of the lost village.  (I also liked the quotidian moving to unsympathetic aunt's house too).  But somehow as things progressed it lost its touch of numinous magic (possibly because "time gypsies" made me feel uncomfortable, possibly because there was a whole group of them and the old woman was unpleasant).  Still, it was enjoyable reading all in all even if it's not a new favorite timeslip story.

The Great Bear (The Misewa Saga #2) by David Alexander Robertson for Timeslip Tuesday

The Great Bear (The Misewa Saga #2) by David Alexander Robertson, this week's Timeslip Tuesday book, is a sequel to The Barren Grounds. This first book was a magnificent portal fantasy, in which two Native kids, Morgan and Eli, open a way through to the land of Misewa, and help save it, and the animal persons who call it home, from a never ending winter.  Though it's been over year since I read it, I vividly remember the cold and the hunger of the kids' journey across the barren lands, and how the animal persons they met there taught them traditional ways to be in the world.

Morgan and Eli have been continuing to visit Misewa every night, travelling through portal pictures Eli draws, and with each night in our world equaling two months there, it now feels like home. It's a place where Morgan is learning Cree ways of being in the world that she never had a chance too in "real" life, having been taken from her mother when she was two. It's a place where Eli reconnects to his own traditional childhood, and a place where being Cree is not something that gets him bullied as it does during the days at school. But their dearest friend in Misewa, the fisher animal person, Ochek, died during their first adventure, and has a left a huge hole in their hearts.

When their foster mom gives Morgan her mother's phone number, her emotions almost overwhelm her; she can't bring herself to call. Realizing how badly Eli is being bullied adds to her distress. And so when Eli draws a portal picture of a Misewa where Ochek is still a kid himself, and offers the chance to travel back to that time when he is still alive, Morgan can't resist.

It is strange and bittersweet to meet someone you know who doesn't know you yet, but gradually Morgan and Eli sink into the routines of the community and find peace. But the piece is shattered when the Great Bear moves down from the north. The bear attacks villages, taking all he wants with savage violence and destruction. And out on Ochek's family's trap line, they meet the bear face to face and recognize him as some one they love in the present time. No one has ever stood against him before, but the two kids and their adopted community find the strength to so to save their village and stop living with fear.

The first book was a journey and quest story; this one is more an emotional one (though not without tension and action). As such, it was moving and immersive and memorable. It ends with one heck of a cliffhanger, which I guess I'm cool with because I wanted more story, not just about Misewa but about Morgan in real life--the fantasy cliffhanger, frankly, interests me less than the prospect of Morgan meeting her birth family....


It works as a time travel book too--the kids openly discuss the ramifications of being in the past of their portal country, though they didn't expect what one of those ramifications would be. (Neither did I, though if I'd been trying to be clever, instead of just enjoying the book, I might have....)


This is this first time travel within a portal fantasy world that I've reviewed, and the only other similar situation I can think of is Prince Caspian, so perhaps I'll review that as time travel some Tuesday. This series gets compared a lot to Narnia, so it's interesting that both second books are time travel-ly (though one is to the past and one to the future). And it does seem that the third Msewa book will be a journey, perhaps echoing Voyage of the Dawn Treader....