Anne Frank and Me, by Cherie Bennett and Jeff Gottesfeld, for Timeslip Tuesday

Anne Frank and Me, by Cherie Bennett and Jeff Gottesfeld (1997), is this week's Timeslip Tuesday offering. It tells of a teenaged girl, Nicole, who's mind is full of stereotypical teen stuff, including pining over Jack.  Her diary thoughts of pining will perhaps be familiar to many readers who are, or once were, teenaged girls with their own hopeless crushes.  

At school, her history teacher is trying to explain the horrors of the holocaust, but it seems distant, and even Anne Frank's diary seems, according to the internet searches Nicole does, a possible fake....so she's not really interested in the class trip to the local "Anne Frank in the World" exhibit, except, of course, that Jack is going to, and maybe he'll want to sit with her on the bus...and he does!  but it turns out that he's actually interested in a friend of hers, and everything is horrible, and then there are gunshots, and everyone thinks is the strange goth-type boy shooting, and she falls and hits her head....

And comes to as a Jewish girl in German occupied Paris. 

She still is her American self at first, but very quickly she fades into the place of the girl whose life she is now living.  Things get worse and worse for the Jewish people of Paris, and she and her little sister end up in hiding.  But they are betrayed and sent on a hellish journey to a concentration camp.  Miraculously she actually meets Anne Frank, who tells her which way to go when they arrive, but the little sister goes the wrong way, Nicole follows, and they end up in a gas chamber.  And as she starts dying, she awakens in her own time again.

And it's not a shooting after all, it was a fireworks prank.

So this started off as a play, and I think this is why it doesn't quite work as novel.  Nicole's tone is very flatly matter-of-factly descriptive through all the horror she endures.  There's little emotion or introspection, and in general it's all told without much inner character development, which is possibly due to her not being herself anymore.  But still it's very gripping and impactful, and I stayed up late finishing it, and was moved by the hideous evil tragedy of it all...

,...with an extra coda of discomfort, not intended by the authors--this was written before the era of school shootings began in earnest with Columbine, and the fact that the shooting with which the time travel begins turns out to be a joke is pretty disturbing to a person reading it now.

 

The Sky Over Rebecca, by Matthew Fox, for Timeslip Tuesday

The Sky Over Rebecca, by Matthew Fox (November 14, 2023, Union Square Kids in the US,  April 14, 2022, Hodder Childrens in the UK), is my favorite of all the new to me books I've read so far this year.  It was supposed to be last week's timeslip Tuesday, but when I was done reading it, instead of sitting down to review it, it was all too fresh and raw and sad in my mind (in a good way) for me to want to think cogently about it.

It's the story of ten-year-old Kara, a lonely girl living in Stockholm with her mother.  Although her beloved Grandfather lives close enough to visit often, which is a comfort, she has no friends, just bullies.  But one day looking out the bus window on her way to school, she sees a snow angel...with no footprints left by its maker.  And that is the start of a magic timeslip adventure, that leads her to Rebecca and her little brother Samuel, two kids living in hiding on an island in the middle of the frozen lake where she and grandfather go ice skating.  

Even Kara's great happiness about making a friend (and being the sort of person who can make friends, which she had worried about), doesn't mean she's not curious about the strangeness of Rebecca and her circumstances.  Gradually she realizes that Rebecca and Samuel slipped through time to hide from the Nazis, the only two from her family to escaped being murdered by them back during WW II.  Now Rebecca and Samuel, who can't walk, are stuck in their island hideaway, in the middle of the Swedish winter, in need of food and warmth, which Kara tries to provide (I liked that Kara's mother is able to help with this, concerned about situation but trusting Kara to do the right thing without trying to take over).  Even the boy who is the worst of the bullies is drawn into the mystery and becomes a good companion and helper (Kara grew tired of living in fear, and punched him, which tilted the balance of their relationship enough so that he, not redeemed but with a greater appreciation of Kara, can reshape their relationship).  

But she can't think of what she can do to help them move on....until Rebecca's prophetic vision of an airplane, from the Allies in the war, landing on the frozen lake comes true.  And oh my gosh do things take an utterly gut wrenching turn at this point, and I wept.  

It is utterly gorgeous time travel, of just the sort of magical slipping through the years that I love best. It's not just the two kids from the past here in the present, but enough of Kara slipping back to make the whole thing dreamlike and wonderful (and also gut wrenching).  It won awards over in England where it was first published, and I'm so glad I heard about it and got hold of a copy.  If you like Action and Adventure, it might not work for you, but if you want a story of a remarkable friendship between brave girls in a cold and snowy setting, with time travel that will remind you of old favorites (and some tense moments that I would count as action with a small a) do seek it out!

I would so dearly love to give it to my young self, who would have read it over and over, but am glad I haven't gotten so old as to not love children's books (even though I have so many on hand that I don't get to reread as much as I'd like...)

When the Sky Falls, by Phil Earle

When the Sky Falls, by Phil Earle  (April 5th 2022 in the US by Bloomsbury Children's Books, June 2021 in the UK), is a moving book about a boy battered by life, and further traumatized by World War II.  

When we first meet 12-year old Joseph he's a kid arriving in London during the blitz; unlike the other young travelers at the station who are being evacuated out of the city, he's been sent into it after his grandmother decides she can no longer cope with him.  He's been packed off to stay with an old friend of hers, Mrs. F., who doesn't really want Joseph either.  Joseph is violently furious at his situation, and at the world, and before the reader knows his story, his frightening anger makes it hard to warm to him.

Mrs. F. is strong enough, though, to compel Joseph to some degree of cooperation, setting him to work helping keep up her family's zoo.  It's not much of a zoo anymore, thanks to the war.  Most of the animals have been shipped off to other zoos, or died.  One of the few left is a gorilla, Adonis.  Joseph finds Adonis terrifying at first, but as he sees the love Mrs. F. has for him, and learns that Adonis is grieving for the lost of his mate and his child, he opens himself to empathy and caring.  

School is a torment (again, his extremely reluctant attendance is a testament to Mrs. F.'s strong will), where his dyslexia keeps him from being able to read (he, and all the teachers he's had throughout his life, who have convinced him he's stupid, don't know it's dyslexia), and other boys make his life miserable. When the boys climb the zoo's fence to come beat him up, one gets too close to Adonis' cage, and the gorilla grabs him by the jacket.  Although the boy isn't physically harmed, he could well have been, and his father wants Adonis killed because of being a danger to the community.

Indeed, every night there's an air raid, which is most nights, Mrs. F. sits outside Adonis' cage with a gun to shoot him if he's ever freed by an explosion, because of the threat a free, angry gorilla would pose.....even though she loves him. (This part is based on a true story).

Gradually we learn details of Joseph's past--how his mother abandoned the family when he was five, and how his father went to war. Gradually Joseph becomes able to accept help, both from Mrs. F. (espeically when she's found the strength to share her own past tragedy with him) and from a girl who's just been orphaned by a bomb; neither will give up on him.  But it is his growing bond with Adonis that helps him most.  Part of it is the warmth of growing trust, that makes Jacob feel like a person worthy of trust.  I'm wondering a bit as well, though it's never stated, if Jacob gets a bit of help with anger management from the dreadful possibility of what Adonis, with no control over his own anger, is capable of.  The book is thought provoking like this, which I appreciated.

In any event, I found their relationship nicely convincing; I'd been afraid that my suspension of disbelief re human/primate friendships was going to be put to the test.  I needn't have worried; it was a plausible relationship, not a sentimentally idealized anthropomorphic one.  

There is not a happy ending.  But though it is sad, it is an ending that give hope for a new beginning, as Mrs. F. and Joseph become family. 

It's a grimly vivid picture of life in a city being destroyed, with a protagonist on the verge of destroying his own life.  When I reached the end, it took me a while to shake of the tension of it all; like all really good and engrossing books, I'd been living it.  A truly powerful read.

disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher

 

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 Longest Night of Charlie Moon, by Christopher Edge, for Timeslip Tuesday

 The Longest Night of Charlie Moon, by Christopher Edge, is a surreal little gem of a middle grade timeslip story that enticed me, confused the heck out of me (not in a bad way though), and then made me cry at the end.  

The enticing part was the forest, where Charlie's friend Dizzy led her one day to see the strange patterns of sticks he'd seen there.  Charlie has recently moved from London, and so the woods are a new thing, and Dizzy, who has a limp leftover from polio (the first clue to the time period), and who is, along with new kid Charlie, on the sidelines of the games played by the other kids, seems to be a good guide.   

But the class bully, Johnny, follows them there to scare them by pretending to be Old Chrony, the wild man rumored to live there.  Scare them Johnny does, but then when the kids realize they are lost, the fear of the dark woods grows more and more palpable.  There seems to be no way out, and though the three kids start to work together as a team, they can't figure out how to get home.

And thing grow more scary still, and more confusing.  Reality shifts, and twists, and the dangerous visions that rise up in the night might or might not be real.  And on top of that, Old Chrony turns out to be real...and very powerful indeed.

At which point the reader gets confirmation that time has been slipping, and that for kids in England in 1933, the future isn't going to be a safe and comforting place.  Which leads to me crying at the end.* 

It also lead to me forgiving the story for ever confusing me.  It all makes sense in retrospect, and I want my own copy now so I can reread it in a year or too. It's not a book for readers who want things explained, or for there to be Reasons and all the backstory to be spelled out.  But it is a book for young (or not so young) readers who want to journey into a terrifying wood beyond the boundaries of what is real, where time slips, and the only way out is through.

personal note--the reader doesn't find out for a while that Charlie is a girl, which I think was a bit of a distraction; it felt a little like a trick trying to be clever, and it throws one out of the story to have a gender switch in the middle of things.  

further note on Charlie--she's a good character for girls who like to code and decipher things to read about!

final note on Charlie--I always hated that nickname for Charlotte, so if you ever meet me in real life, please don't use it!

note on Johnny--though he's a bully, he's not a terrible one, and it's believable that he's able to work with the other kids as things progress.  

note on the time travel side of things--this is one in which time slips, and the future is glossed over the present; there's no actual travel to different times.

* the thing that made me cry is a spoiler! turn back now!

I wasn't expecting Dunkirk, and Dunkirk makes me sob every single darn time.

Blitzed, by Robert Swindells, for Timeslip Tuesday

I thought about the Blitz quite a lot in the Spring of 2000, when life became full of fearful uncertainty mixed with dull, aching boredom, and I wondered how the people of London could have kept going with bombs raining death every night for months.  Blitzed, by Robert Swindells (May 2002), is the story of a modern kid who gets to find out. 

Georgie is a normal boy of 2002, with a bit of an attitude, a fondness for "creeping" with his mates through the local back gardens in commando-style raids (which didn't endear him to me), and a keen interest in World War II.  He's thrilled to go on a class trip to a former POW camp turned WW 2 museum, with 29 huts each showcasing a particular aspect of the war.  The fifth hut, in which there's a replica of a bombed London street, is the most gripping.  All the sounds and smells are there, and there's even a hand, reaching helpless out of the rubble.  And suddenly Georgie is there too, seeing it all in real life, and running from the desperate hand, instead of trying to help.

The first few days of being lost, scared, and starving are terrible ones, but then his luck gets better.  He finds a group of kids living furtively in a bombed out pub, surviving under the leadership of Ma, who lets Georgie join them.  

Ma isn't a grown-up herself, though; she is only 14.  By dint of shear force of will she's able to keep the kids reasonably clean and fed (though poorly) with her wages from a work at a dingy second-hand clothing shop.  And Georgie takes his place in the group, and starts helping her in the shop (when the proprietor is away).  It is all horrible (and one of the kid's is killed by a bomb), and rather boring for the people living through it at the same time time.  

But things heat up story-wise when Georgie finds evidence that the shop keeper is a spy, and Ma and the kids help find more evidence.  Georgie gets a real war time adventure, and then finds himself home again....and finds Ma again too. 

Georgie tells his story in short first person chapters, giving it an immediacy and intimacy that draws the reader in (and making it a good one for emergent middle grade readers).  His traumatized reactions (throwing up more than once, collapsing into tears) ring true.  Yet it's not all doom and gloom; Georgie is a smart-alek, and though I didn't like this in his 21st century self, it added humor to his time in the past, as did the 21st century colloquialisms and slips that he makes as a time-traveler.

Young readers who like stories of kids surviving on their own in disasters, becoming a found families in the process will enjoy this one lots!  I did, after I got over my initial dislike for Georgie (I just really don't like kids who destroy gardens.  Fortunately his parents make him go fix the garden fence he broke, and the satisfaction he gets from this is a sign that character growth will come....).  

The Chaos Loop (Throwback #2), by Peter Lerangis, for Timeslip Tuesday

In Throwback (link to my review), Peter Lerangis told the story of an ordinary New York boy, Corey Fletcher, who discovers he has an extraordinary power.  He's a time traveler, but not just any old time traveler, hopping back into the past as a tourist.  Corey is a Throwback, who can actually change things.  He uses his new found gift to save his grandmother's life.  

Now, as told in The Chaos Loop (Harper Collins, May 2020), Corey has an even more ambitious goal--to travel back in time and stop Hitler.  There's an urgency to it--too much traveling in time might make his genes give way, leaving him a mutant animal, unable to go back on any more visits to the past, as it has done to two other travelers he knows.  He has to make his gift count, before it's not safe to use it any more.

And so, with his friend Leila, who was part of his first time travel adventuring, he goes to Germany.  It is 1938, and although many Germans worship Hitler, there are those who do not.  And Corey is determined to make sure their plot to kill Hitler works.

It doesn't.  

Corey and Leila then meet Hitler when he's a struggling artist in Vienna. If they can push him forward on that path, he won't go into politics.

It doesn't work.

So Corey, realizing that trying to stop Hitler leads to a chaos loop every time, decides to fix a smaller thing, the death of his own great uncle, who died escaping the Nazis.....

It's a tad slow to get going; I wasn't immediately hooked, and even found Corey a little tiresome in his impulsiveness.  Leila is much more level headed!  But once things start going wrong, it was fascinating! The interactions of the kids with the past people they meet are believable, and the little nudges to the past are well within the realm of possibility.   I think many young readers are fascinated by Hitler's rise to power, and certainly many of us have daydreamed about how we would try to stop him if we had the chance, making this a book that's both good historical fiction and a chance to imagine oneself inside the story.  Kids who love thinking "what if?" about the past will enjoy it lots! 

And the cliffhanger ending (changing the past is a very tricky thing....) will make them want the third book ASAP.  

Voyages in the Underworld of Orpheus Black, by Marcus Sedgwick and Julian Sedgewick, illustrated by Alexis Deacon

Voyages in the Underworld of Orpheus Black, by Marcus Sedgwick and Julian Sedgewick, illustrated by Alexis Deacon (Walker Books US, August 13, 2019), is a strange, melancholy, moving fever-dream of a story.  It tells of young Henry Black, a conscientious objector battling the fires of the London blitz, who dreams of chronicling the war through his art and his journal writing (this journal constitutes the prose and pictures of the book).  His decision not to fight has created a rift between him and his father and brother, Ellis.  It's the loss of Ellis that hurts Henry most, and so he is glad that Ellis agrees to meet him at a London pub.  The two brothers don't exactly reconcile, but it is clear that their love is still alive at its roots.  And then, after Henry leaves the pub, it is bombed, as is the bus Henry was trying to take home.

When he wakes with a severe head injury in the hospital, his journal turns into a feverish record of his desperate efforts to find his brother and dig him out from the wreckage.  He is accompanied on his quest by Agatha, a German Jewish refugee child he met at the hospital, who is longing to find her parents.  Through the horrors of WW II London, the two of them travel, going ever deeper below the city.  And at last, they find what they were seeking.

Though Henry is not directly aware of it, he has a guide of sorts on his journey--Orpheus, who sees parallels between his own story and Henry's quest  to venture into the realm of death to bring back a loved one.  The reader, however, knows Orpheus is involved from the beginning; he presents his own poetic narrative alongside Henry's journal entries.  Orpheus' involvement gives a mythic gravitas to Henry's inchoate chronicle of his desperate journey through the hell of bombed London, and his prophetic words about future war, alongside strange futurist horrors dreamed of and drawn by Henry, lift this war from specific to universal terror.

It is not a fast, fun read.  You have to be in the right frame of mind, to take it as it comes and reflect and ponder without troubling too much about narrative coherence.  And I was able to do that, to an extent.  What held me back from being deeply involved was the poetry of Orpheus, which I did not care for.  I would much much much have preferred pure blank verse to the rhymes that kept popping up.  They just killed the mood for me.

I'm not quite sure who the perfect audience for the book is.  Greek mythology fans, looking for a retelling, might be disappointed; it's more an echoing than a reimagining (though small details were pleasing--Persephone, aka Kore, becomes a woman named Cora, for instance).  Some young readers might not have the patience to accept the strange.  But those young readers who do, in particular those drawn to thought-provoking meditations on history, will be rewarded.

dislaimer: review copy received from the publisher

The Turnkey of Highgate Cemetery, by Allison Rushby

"A middle grade book about ghostly spying in WW II England?  Sign me up!" sums up my reaction to The Turnkey of Highgate Cemetery, by Allison Rushby (Candlewick, July 24,2018), and I was (for the most part) not disappointed, and enjoyed the book lots.

When Flossie died, from complications of rheumatic fever when she was just 12, she found herself with a job to do.  She became the Turnkey of Highgate Cemetery in London, responsible for keep all the dead in her care at peace.  But the peace of London has been shattered by the blitz, and when Flossie sees the ghost of a Nazi officer snooping around St. Paul's, her suspicions are aroused.  Quite rightly, too--as the story unfolds, she finds that he is indeed the mastermind of a sinister plot to use his ghostly state to pass on top secret information back to Germany.

Flossie has no particular powers of her own, outside her own cemetery, but she's still determined to stop him.  But how?  Her path takes her to Germany, where she meets a ghost girl with secrets of her own, and requires her to work with the other Turnkeys of London, including one who seems almost hostile.

The story unfolds very nicely, building up the tension gradually as the bombs fall on London.  Flossie is a heroine to cheer for, as she navigates her various responsibilities to both the dead and the living.  An element of pathos such as pathos loving mg readers will appreciate is provided by a girl torn between living and dying after loosing her family in the Blitz, who Flossie tries to convince to choose life. If you are a fan of WW II stories for kids, this is a very interesting twist on the usual plots, that I appreciated lots!  My only disappointment was that at the end of the story, Flossie decides that her responsibilities are to the dead, not the living, and so she has no plans to go on to become a spy herself to help win the war.

disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher.

The Dollmaker of Krakow, by R.M. Romero

The Dollmaker of Krakow, by R.M. Romero (Delacorte, middle grade, Sept. 2017) is a haunting historical fantasy set in WW II that has just been recognized as a 2018 Notable Book of the Sydney Taylor Book Awards.

In the Land of the Dolls, Karolina was a seamstress, living at peace with her friends.  But then the rats came, and peace was no more.  At the lowest point in her life, the rats having wrecked everything, a strange wind whisks her away, and she finds herself in the shop of a lonely toymaker in Krakow, Poland.  He is making a dollhouse that is truly a thing of beauty, and he made the body Karolina now inhabits to live there.  But Karolina isn't just any doll; she still is herself, able to talk and think, and the lonely man and the exiled doll become good companions.

The dollhouse is being made for a little girl named Rena, and when the Dollmaker delivers it, Karolina goes too, and reveals her secret.  The Trzmiel family takes this in stride, and become friends.   But then the Nazis invade Poland, and life becomes very difficult, especially for Jewish families like the Trzmiels.  The Dollmaker was originally a German, and registers as such with the Nazis (though he gets vilified by his neighbors for this)  to get extra food to share with the Trzmiels, but as things get worse and worse for the Jews of Krakow, it becomes clear that Rena and the other children now suffering in the ghetto, must somehow be saved.

The Dollmaker, inspired by the living doll Karolina, uses his skill to find a strange and wonderful solution that is truly magical.  Rena and a handful of other children are saved, but her father, and the Dollmaker, are lost.

Though the evil of the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, from the mundane hatred to the buildup of the Holocaust, is not sugar coated, and the historical details are vivid, and the sadness heart-wrenching, the fairytale element of Karolina acts as a buffer between reader and horror, making this a good one for sensitive readers.  It's also a good one for readers who find historical fiction is more appealing when mixed with fantasy.  And so it succeeds in this regard, and the characters are memorable and the story moving.  That being said, the fairy tale part, especially the flashbacks of Katrina remembering the war with the rats in her own land, ended up diminishing the power of the book for me, with the real horror folded into a framework of the clearly fantastical that never happened.  Except that in the end I was crying just fine, despite the fantasy elements.

It's a tricky book, though, for the adult to try to see through the eyes of a child reader, because of course adults know so much of the history already.  And the Dollmaker, badly scarred in mind and body by the first world war, is a character who I think is more interesting to an adult reader than a child one.  I loved the Dollmaker--the lonely ordinary person, badly hurt in the past but holding strong to decency despite everything, is one of my favorite types of character.  But I did love the dollhouse, and Karolina, just as much as I would have as a child (the dollhouse especially).


disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher for Cybils Award consideration.

Cold Summer, by Gwen Cole, for Timeslip Tuesday

This week's Timeslip Tuesday book is Cold Summer, by Gwen Cole (Sky Pony Press, 2017), a YA with a generous dash of romance made tricky by time travel.  It is now 6:45, and I haven't finished the book, so as time is marching on I'll quickly write about the 150 pages I have read, and then come back after each 50 page chunk to continue onward....

The first 150 pages did not, I think, need to be 150 pages long.  We have at this point gotten very familiar with the two main characters.  The girl character, Harper, has come to live with her Uncle Jasper in the small rural town she used to visit every summer when she was a young girl; she and her mom are calling it quits in their relationship.  The boy character, Kale, is a permanent resident of said town, except that he travels through time for a few days just about every week.  This stinks for him--his missing days have gotten him kicked out of school and alienated his father, who won't believe  him (though he's told a few other people who do, like Jasper, and since he disappears-poof!- when he time travels, and knows its about to happen, he could have timed it so his father had to see him vanish thus convincing him....).  Time travel stink for Kale more than it usually does because he's currently caught in a loop of having to go fight on the European front of WW II every week, which is horrible for him.  The time travel, though cruel, does at least return him to the past in the clothes he was wearing back then, so at least he doesn't have to worry (after the first time) about fitting in--he just has to kill people and stay alive.

Kale and Harper were the best of friends when they were young, and now are ready to be more than friends, and Kale has managed to explain to Harper that he time travels.  She would like him to stop, and so would he.  They have just kissed.  There have been lots of pages of minutia as they work up to this point.  I feel I have gotten all the points now, and am ready for some time travel explanation/resolution....

Onward!

Now it is 7:04 and I've reached page 202.   Kale and Harper have kissed again, with more conviction, and Harper has held him in the present instead of seeing him slip into the past.  She's also had a realization that he's using the past as an escape from his unhappy present with all the tension between him and his father.  In the past, as he realized in his most recent trip to WW II, he feels needed and has a sense of belonging.   And so he's caught in a feedback loop of metaphorical portent...

Now to cook supper.

While I was cooking, Kale finds that his dad has taken up his old bad habit of drinking and gambling. Kale goes to look for him in the bar, finds him, and finds the two toughs to whom his dad owes money.  A fight ensues.  Kale gives the toughs his own beloved car to pay his dad's debt.  His dad has been listening to Kale's brother explaining things, and now believes Kale is a time traveler.  The barrier between them falls.

Yay! Page 236 brings real scary tension and threat and impetus to what had been pleasant enough but not deeply interesting reading.  Now the time travel thing threatens to be more than just a huge inconvenience for Kale....and suddenly I am reading a real page turner of a book, with lots of keen interest in the emotional states of the characters and how it will all work out...and the scenes back in WW II are incredibly vivid and gripping and all is tense.....(went and turned supper off to let it just sit there and think about life while I finished the book...)

Because this is a YA romance-type book, it's a pretty safe bet that you all expect Kale to live, and indeed it is a happy, hopeful ending in which the parents and the kids mend bridges and though Kale still time travels from time to time, at least WW II is over.  Though the time travel is never explained.

So if you like YA romance time travel where family healing is almost as important to the two main characters as their attraction for each other, that allows you plenty of time to watch the characters moving toward each other before it really gets going, give this one a try!  70 really interesting pages at the end, unsubtle but engrossing, 230 that you can skim gently and briskly to get the point of, with a few moments of heartfeltness but mostly not so much.  I liked the parts back in WW II the best.

Here's the Kirkus review, which more or less agrees with my take on things. 

Once Was a Time, by Leila Sales, for Timeslip Tuesday

I have  actually gotten my ducks in a row and have a book for this week's Timeslip Tuesday--Once Was a Time, by Leila Sales (Chronicle Books, Middle Grade, April 5, 2016).

In England in WW II, Lottie's scientist father spends his days trying to figure out the secrets of time travel.  He believes that shimmering time portals randomly appear, but doesn't know how they work.  Time travel could have military uses, and so 10-year-old  Lottie and her dearest friend Kitty are taken hostage; the kidnappers think her dad knows more than he's letting on, and are going to kill the two girls unless he spills his secretes. 

And then a time portal appears (!) and Lottie, hardly pausing to think, jumps through to escape her captors, leaving Kitty behind.  And her father, and the whole world of WW II England. She finds herself in our time, in the Midwest, in her pajamas in the middle of nowhere, with no way to get home again.  Fortunately, she finds a friendly library (which has relevance to the plot).  Fortunately as well, she is taken in by a foster family (child services is almost magically wonderful), and so she becomes an ordinary American school kid.  Except that she is haunted not just by her lost life in generally, but by her abandonment of Kitty.  Never will she have another friend like her, and so she goes along with the group of girls who took her in, enchanted by her English accent, even though she doesn't have much in common with her.

But then she finds something hidden in a copy of her favorite book that gives her hope that she might find Kitty again, that maybe Kitty didn't die, even though that's what it says on line.  And so she finds a way to get to Italy, with the help of a boy who could have been her friend if her clique of girls hadn't taught her to shun him,  following clues that Kitty maybe, perhaps, left.....

This is both a good, solid time travel story (by which I mean it deals with the whole cultural dislocation of time travel nicely, without getting too terribly caught up in Lottie's exploration of the wonders of the future), mixed with a good friendship story--being true to yourself and making friends with who you want to be friends with without getting caught up in peer pressure.  The best part of the book was when Lottie and the shuned boy who is now her friend get to know and appreciate each other, and Lottie starts realizing that even though she left Kitty that doesn't mean she shouldn't ever be allowed to have good friends again. 

So if you go to Amazon you'll see that there are people saying this will appeal to fans of When You Reach Me and Wrinkle in Time.  Um, not so much, I think, especially not Wrinkle in Time which is not actually about time travel qua time travel for crying out loud.  And When You Reach Me feels like it has sharper edges than this one.  I think it will really appeal to fans of Charlotte Sometimes, by Penelope Farmer, which probably hasn't be read by young people today....to me, a fan of older English books like that one, it had a lovely familiar feel and I enjoyed it very much.  A contemporary review of Charlotte Sometimes said ""…this is really a study in disintegration, the study of a girl finding an identity by losing it… " and this is exactly what happens to the Charlotte of Once Was a Time as well.
It also reminded me of  Dreamer, Wisher, Liar, by Clarise Mericle Harper.  But even if you don't like time travel for its own sake, it's also a good one for fans of middle school girl friendship drama.

And now I will treat myself to a round of "What does Kirkus say?"

drumroll

Total agreement!  Kirkus says:  Her transition to her new life is awkward but realistic, and the focus of this charming novel is always on friendship and loyalty. Rewarding and uplifting."

So there you go.

The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle, by Janet Fox

The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle, by Janet Fox (Viking Books for Young Readers, March 15, 2016, middle grade), went on my tbr list the moment I laid eyes on its description--siblings evacuated from WW II London to a castle in Scotland where there is sinister magic afoot.  It sounded perfect for me! Alas, although there were things I appreciated, and I am happy to recommend it to middle grade readers who like slow burn horror, and although lots of other people really like and it's gotten lots of stars and rave reviews, it fell short for me.

The sinister magic was plenty sinister.  It is clear from the get go, both to the reader and to the central protagonist, Kat, the oldest of the London siblings, that all is not wholesome sunshine and light at Rookskill Castle, and that the lady of the castle is clearly not a Good Thing.  In a series of flashbacks taking us back into the past of the lady of the castle, the reader is told of the horrible bargains that Lady Eleanor has made over the years.  And it is indeed darkly horrible, and really creepy and fascinating.  But the result is that the reader knows many things long before the characters do, and as the pages turned and the number of child victims of dark magic rose, I became frustrated there was nothing actually being done about it.  It's not until around 280 pages into the book that Kat begins to actively confront Lady Eleanor, and instead of being as tense as I could have been, I was mostly just relieved that Kat was finally using her own magical talismans and actually doing something for crying out loud.

I also really did not feel as though the whole German spy subplot was necessary (I rarely feel German spy subplots add all that much), and indeed, frustrated as I was that it was taking Kat so long to stop thinking that she should "keep calm and carry on" (as her father had told her to do), the fact that she was dragged into decoding cyphers didn't seem to be to the point.  Nor did it seem at all necessary for the anti-German-spy folks to actually be trying to use magic to counter the Germans.  I'm not against using magic against the Nazis, but I think it has to be worked into a story more naturally than it is here, where it is basically just stated.  Although it's not an uninteresting story in its own right, it detracts and distracts from the specialness of Kat's magic, and Lady Eleanor's magic, and does not do much to further the plot.

So in short I didn't like this book as much as I'd hoped I would--it took too long for the main character to become an active protagonist, and the insertion of German spy magic subplot was pretty much a WTF for me instead of a positive addition.  Oh well.  You can go read the Kirkus review now, for a different opinion!

The War That Saved My Life, by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

Theoretically I am only supposed to be reading books from my TBR pile until I have read 100 of them....but in practice I just had to read The War That Saved My Life, by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley (Dial, January 2015) just as soon as ever I could because how could I not want to read the story of a hideously neglected and abused girl with a clubfoot whose life is saved when WW II happens and she is evacuated to the countryside of Kent and learns to ride a pony and gets new clothes for the first time and finds out what it is like to be loved?????

Ada has spent her life confined to a one room 3rd floor apartment, spending her days looking after her younger brother Jamie...or, as he gets older and goes off without her outside, simply staring out the window, or disappearing into the void of her mind.  She has a clubfoot, and her mother has made it clear--horribly, abusively clear-- that she is so deformed and worthless that she can never go outside herself.   Any sign of spirit in Ada is answered with violence, or worse still, she is shut up in a cabinet.

Then WW II happens, and Jamie is going to be evacuated with the other school children.  And Ada seizes the chance to escape herself,  making her painful way with Jamie to the train station.  Fate smiles on Ada and Jamie--they are dumped on Susan, a woman who doesn't want them, a woman who is grieving over the death of her partner Becky*, a woman who doesn't think she has anything to give two rather wretched children, one of whom, Ada, who has never before even seen grass....

Happily it turns out that Susan is exactly what the two children need, and they are what she needs as well, and Ada slowly gains self-confidence and begins to cast off the years of being told she is hateful and worthless.  Susan reads to them (Swiss Family Robinson to start with), she feeds them and bathes them and braids Ada's hair, and eventually Ada thaws enough so that Susan can teach her to read and write, and to love and be loved.

But in the meantime the war is growing closer....and Kent, where Susan lives, no longer seems safe....

And also in the meantime Ada shows preternatural ability at horseback riding, which both delighted the part of me that still thinks like a ten year old girl and strained the credulity of the somewhat larger part of me that doesn't.  The spy bit also was a bit of stretch....And even more so, I constantly was questioning whether Ada, the bright first-person narrator, was at all believable as a person who had suffered as much abuse as she had, and I am not convinced she was.   I feel that Goodnight, Mr. Tom, by Michelle Magorian, which is a very similar story (abused evacuee finds loving home) is a stronger book, perhaps because it is not told in the first person, allowing greater suspension of disbelief.

Still, my doubts paled in comparison to the pleasure of the minutia of Ada's life with Susan, and The War That Saved My Life was a single-sitting book that I enjoyed very much. 

* It's not explicitly stated that Susan and Becky were in a relationship, but there are plenty of clues that the reader who's aware of the possibility will pick up on pretty easily.   I very much appreciated the bits of backstory to Susan's life as an Oxford educated woman disowned by her disapproving father because of her relationship with Becky, and I also appreciated how Susan's grief over Becky would resurface periodically in small but very poignant, very believable ways.  This book is not just the story of Ada healing but of Susan healing as well, and this was a very nice contrast to the relentless focus on  child protagonists in so much (though by no means all) middle grade fiction.  I think it's nice for kids to think about how grownups feel too!

Ghosts of War: The Secret of Midway, by Steve Watkins

Ghosts of War: The Secret of Midway, by Steve Watkins (Scholastic, December 2014, middle grade) is ghost story with bonus exciting history lesson, so much so that instead of leaving the book at my mother's as planned I am going to take it back home and try to get my picky 14 year old history buff to read it.

Anderson is cleaning out a  basement room full of junk below his uncle's antique shop to make a practice place for his new band--himself, his best friend Steve, and (with mixed feelings on Anderson's part), a not-quite friend named Julie.   There in an old trunk he finds a peacoat from WW II--and when the coat is brought out, the ghost of its owner appears.   William Foxwell, a young sailor who died in the war, needs help remembering what happened to him, and so the three kids begin to unravel just who he was, and how he died.  An old letter in the pocket is the first clue...

And in the meantime, the three of them deal with grief from objectionable elements at school, the bond between them is strengthened, and Anderson tries not to talk to much to the ghost when other people are around....

Always eager to become more educated through pleasure reading, I truly appreciated the history contained in this story--I'd only had a vague impression of the Battle of Midway before, but now I know so much more about it's importance, and the sadness of it.  William's story didn't have a happy ending (he's a ghost, after all), and it's fascinating to find out just what happened to him.   The balance of historical detection and real world issues (the bully at school, Steve's borderline abusive dad, Anderson's mom having MS, Julie becoming less prickly) is well done.    I also appreciated the fact that solving the mystery meant asking men and women who were actually alive back then what had happened, and listening to their stories--it's nice to see the experiences of older generations appreciated.  And a final thing I appreciated was that the tone of the book was not anti-Japan--for instance, Julie's dad is Japanese, and through her family back there they are able to hear from a Japanese officer expressing regret for the last bit of William's sad story.

So in any event, like I said, I'll be offering it to my distressingly difficult reader--it's fairly short (191 pages) and it's a fast read, and I think he'll enjoy the combination of ghost, mystery, and history.  

note--although Julie is half-Japanese, she's not quite enough of a main character for me to put this one on my multicultural spec. fic. list.  Maybe in subsequent books in the series (which I look forward to reading) she will be less a side-kick and more central....

disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher

The Children of the King, by Sonya Hartnett

Sometimes I read a book and am stunned by its kid appeal, and other times I read a book and want to urge other grown-ups to read it, and this is not a judgment of book goodness or lack thereof, but simply how the story feels to me.   Falling firmly into this later category is The Children of the King, by Sonya Hartnett (Candlewick, March 2014 in the US).

One the face of it, it seems like a book young me would have loved, back in the day (for starters, the cover art is total eye candy for the romantic young girl).  Cecily, her older brother Jeremy, and their mother leave London during WW II, retreating to the old family home deep in the countryside of northern England.  There is a bonus additional child, an interesting little girl, taken in along the way.  There is the crumbling old castle on the edge of the estate, that holds secrets of a mysterious past; Uncle Peregrine tells the children its story, which involves Richard III, and does so most grippingly.  There is a strong element of fantasy, lifting it all out of the ordinary.  And the writing is lovely, with pleasing descriptions of food and bedrooms and the books in the library (three things I like to read about).

But yet it felt more like a book for adults, and I'm not at all sure young me would have found it entirely pleasing.

For one thing, Cecily, whose point of view we share, is ostensibly a twelve year old, but she acts much younger, and is thoughtless, somewhat unintelligent, and not really a kindred spirit.  The way she behaves is all part of a convincingly drawn character, but it is not an appealing one.   May, the younger evacuee, is much more interesting, but she is off at a distance from the reader.   I think young readers expect to like the central character; Cecily felt to me like a character in a book for grown-ups, where there is no such expectation.  Likewise, the dynamics among the family (and May), strained by the war, involve lots of undercurrents of tension that are complicated and disturbing.

For another thing, and this gets a tad spoilery, it is clear pretty early on that the two boys Cecily and May meet in the ruined castle are from another time, and what with the title being what it is, anyone who knows the story of Richard III can put the pieces together (it will, of course, take longer for the child reader who has No Clue).   But these two boys aren't directly players in the story taking place in the present, nor does the fact of their existence bring about obvious change.  They are more like ghost metaphors or something and the book would have a coherent story (though a less lovely one) without them, and so they disappointed me.  These sorts of ghost aren't  exactly what I expect in a book for children, but I'd love to talk to a grown-up about them!  And this ties in with a more general feeling I had, that I was being expected to Think Deeply and Make Connections, and I almost feel that I should now be writing an essay on "Power and Metaphor in The Children of the King."

So, the upshot of my reading experience was that I appreciated the book just fine, but wasn't able to love it with the part of mind that is still, for all intents and purposes, eleven years old. 

Here are other reviews, rather more enthusiastic:

The Children's War
Waking Brain Cells
The Fourth Musketeer

I've reviewed one other book by Sonya Hartnett --The Silver Donkey (it was one of my very early reviews, back in 2007).  I seem to have appreciated that one more, but it amused me that I had something of the same reaction to the stories within the story:  "I'm not a great fan of interjected stories in general, because I resent having the narrative flow broken, and also because I feel challenged by them. The author must have put them in for Deep Reasons, I think, and will I be clever enough to figure out what they were?"

Behind Enemy Lines (Infinity Ring 6), by Jennifer A. Nielsen, for Timeslip Tuesday

This week, Timeslip Tuesday falls on a Wednesday (these things happen, even in the best of families), and today's book is Behind Enemy Lines (Infinity Ring 6), by Jennifer A. Nielsen (Scholastic, 2013). 

The Infinity Ring series tells of three kids (Daq, Sera, and Riq) trying to fix history and prevent a cataclysm, and so far in the series they have bounced between many time periods and many places...but still there are more breaks in the way things should have gone for them to set right.  I was rather excited for this episode, because it's about World War II, a favorite period of mine.   In the time line in which the three kids grew up, the Allies didn't win WW II.  Instead, it was a stalemate, allowing a third party ("SQ," an organization working against the time-fixers side of things) to take over.  

But if  Daq, Sera, and Riq can fix one small thing, the Allies will win....and this small thing is a really truly cool piece of trickery on the part of the Allies.  They took a corpse, disguised him as an officer in the Royal Marines, complete with just tons of neat little details to make his identity more believable, and dumped him at sea, where he'd wash up in Spain.   The corpse was carrying Secret Information about the planned Allied invasion of Greece--when really the Allies were planning to invade Sicily.   If all went well, the Germans would get their hands on this intelligence, and swallow the story hook, line, and sinker.  And it worked!

Operation Mincemeat, as this was known, really happened, although not, of course, helped along by three kids from the future.  Jennifer Nielsen did a great job bringing it to life (inadvertent irony), and I enjoyed it lots, and also enjoyed delving on my own deeper into the Mincemeat story (cool fact--because the Germans were so badly burned by this one, two subsequent occasions when the Allies accidentally let important information fall into their hands were dismissed as being more trickery, saving the Allies' tail).

The book did strain my credulity.  Too many adults trusted the kids for no good reason, and some of the opportunities they encountered were not exactly plausible.   But extra interest was added by a time travelling bad guy working hard to mess things up, and I was glad to see that in this episode the three protagonists were spending less time annoying each other (and me), and more time getting things done.   The fact that they were separated for most of the story helped in this regard!

So a fine addition to the series, and it's a pity that it can't quite stand alone, because kids who are WW II buffs who haven't necessarily read the whole series would enjoy it lots.

Review copy received from the publisher.

Listening for Lucca, by Suzanne LaFleur, for Timeslip Tuesday

Listening for Lucca, by Suzanne LaFleur (Wendy Lamb Books, August  2013, middle grade), is a gentle sort of time slip book with a very intriguing premise.

The story begins with Sienna's family moving from Brooklyn to an old Victorian house on the coast of Maine.  Sienna doesn't mind--she welcomes the chance for a fresh start with kids who don't think she's weird (she sees things no one else can, and gathers old, abandoned things to care for).  But the move is mostly for her brother's benefit-- the family hopes that the change will give three-year-old  Lucca the change he needs to start to talk again after a year of silence. 

In the closet of her new room, Sienna finds a pen, left there years ago, and when she writes with it, another girl's words come out on the pages.  Sarah lived in the house during World War II...and through the journal entries that come from the pen, Sienna learns about her life, and how, when her brother, Joshua, went of to fight, Sarah stopped talking.  

Sienna in the present is given the chance to make friends with kids her own age...who might prove to be real friends if they aren't scared off by her strangeness...and all the while she works hard to be a good sister to Lucca, trying to stave off the desperate worry that his silence is all her fault.

And all the while her worry about Sarah grows, as the pen writes the story of Sarah's life.  To help Sarah, and maybe her brother Lucca, speak again, Sienna must do more than allow the pen to write the past.  She must go back herself, and help Joshua, a wretched shell of himself after the horrors of war, tell Sarah what she needs to hear so that she can speak.

It was a good, engrossing read, with a captivating storyline.   I feel I should have loved it--nice time travel, nice characters, nice place--yet it didn't quite make it into my heart.  I'm never entirely sure why this happens with books, but I've come up with a few possible reasons for this one.

I'm a very visual reader, and I love books that make pictures in my mind.  Drafting this review in my head, it occurred to me that I had left the story with no mental image of the house at all.   I love "moving into old house" books, and reading all the minuscule details of nooks and crannies and old cupboards...but this house is simply described as "an old Victorian," and that's pretty much it.  So that was disappointing.  This isn't the book's fault; it's me as a reader.

Sarah's story back in the past was much  more emotionally gripping than Sienna's present--making new friends actually goes very well for Sienna, despite the fact that she is rather passive about it, whereas Sarah is caught in a situation of serious emotional blackmail that pulled at my heart-strings.    Sienna takes a pretty passive approach to the historical mystery as well; she does undertake a bit of historical detective work, but mostly she just lets the timeslip pen do most of the work of finding out about the past.   And the pen isn't made special enough--it is just a handy plot device of little emotional zing.

Finally, I just couldn't be satisfied with the easy resolution to Lucca's mutism, even though it makes sense in the context of the fantastical elements of the story; it was a problem too easily solved, and not sufficiently explained, for me to accept it.

So no, it wasn't one I loved, but it was one I enjoyed and read pretty much in a single sitting.  So if a somewhat gently-paced timeslip focusing on characters past and present sounds appealing, do try it.  You might love it; Publishers Weekly did, and gave it a starred review.

Crocuses Were Over, Hitler Was Dead, by Geraldine Symons (UK title--Now and Then), for Timeslip Tuesday

Crocuses Were Over, Hitler Was Dead, by Geraldine Symons (1977).  

The old house has been empty for years, sitting in its English gardens, waiting...and now it's being opened up again, as  tourist attraction.   Jassy is there to see it happen--she's staying in the cottage of the head gardener and his wife, while her little siblings recover from mumps.

As she explores the gardens, she meets a young man and his dogs, and they talk.  But when she gets back to the cottage, she realizes that there is a strangeness to her new friend.   There were crocus were blooming when she met him first, and he was worried about Hitler...and the crocuses are over, and Hitler is dead.

Slowly realizing that she's slipping back in time, she gradually finds out more about her new friend, facing a war that's about to destroy the peace of the old garden.  But why is he sometimes so kind and thoughtful, other times so wild and heedless? 

It's not much of a mystery, and not much of a plot, qua plot.  But it is magical, and beautiful, and makes pictures in the mind.  If you like gentle, very English, timeslip stories in which the only immediate tensions are small ones, you will enjoy this.   Jassy never has to actually do something (except keep past and present clear in her mind, so she doesn't seem strange and isn't a nuisance to the nice couple she's staying with), but it's a pleasure to explore the old house and its gardens with her.

There is, though, a bit of emotional depth.  It's rather poignant, in that gradually Jassy and the reader find out what's going happen to the nice young man in the war, and she can't do a thing about it.   So there a sense of sadness...but at least the house and the gardens make it through unscathed.

There's a copy for sale on Amazon right now for $1.49, which is a good price to pay for a rather lovely escape from reality.  And if you have an old public library whose shelves haven't been ruthlessly weeded, you might be able to find Geraldine Symons books about the adventures two early 20th century (or possibly late 19th century) girls, Pansy and Atalanta, that are well worth reading (especially Miss Rivers and Miss Bridges, in which they infiltrate the suffragette movement).

Johnny and the Bomb, by Terry Pratchett, for Timeslip Tuesday

Terry Pratchett is, of course, best known for his Discworld books, but he also wrote (among other things) a three book sci fi/fantasy series for readers 9-12, about a boy named Johnny Maxwell and his friends.  Johnny and the Bomb, the third book (1996), takes Johnny and co. back in time to World War II, just as their town is about to be hit by German bombs....

Johnny knows the bombs are coming, and that people will be killed because the air raid siren isn't going to off and warn them.  If he can sound the alarm, he can save them...but caught in the temporal paradoxes of changing the past, and hampered more than he's helped by his companions in adventure, he might not be able to.

Johnny and his friends are a somewhat confusing bunch of mis-fits (three boys, and one girl)--they are all rather mad, in the British sense of the word.   The madness that they create just by existing is compounded when they encounter the shopping cart of a bag lady, who just happens (though they don't know it) to keep time (or something very like it) in the grotty plastic bags she wheels around.  When Johnny and the friend who is a girl (mostly named Kirsty though sometimes she chooses not to be) start poking at the cart (not that they really wanted to, but these things happen), it starts whisking them through time.

And eventually all five kids are back in 1941, not adding much to moral, and not, at first, realizing that if they don't do something, the bombs will kill the very people they are meeting.  It does not help that one friend has decided to travel through time wearing a German uniform.

I rather think that I had read the other two books first, I would have been altogether calmer and more receptive, happy to see Johnny and all instead of confused and unconvinced by them (although not un-entertained).    But I had not, and so I was.   Fortunately, I was curious enough to continue on (chuckling, it must be said, quite often), and was rewarded by a cracker-jack time-travel paradox gem when Johnny must slide around the linear path of time to sound the alarm.  That part was really good (or fully realized, if you want something fancier).

Short answer:  read the first book first.  Read this one first only if you are a. a passionate devotee of WW II juvenile fiction b.  reading every time travel book for kids you can.


Bonus:  interesting bit of grim humor regarding how the residents of WW II England might react to a black boy (one of Johnny's friends)

Final note:  it is never explained how or why the mysterious bag lady and her shopping cart travel through time, so don't expect to be any wiser by the end of the book.