Furyborn, by Claire Legrand, for Timeslip Tuesday

I am writing this with some reluctance, because it is horribly hot inside my house (no a.c.) and the keyboard is unpleasantly warm (wrists must be kept up and away from it!), and also because it is something of a spoiler to come right out and say Furyborn, by Claire Legrand (Sourcebooks, May 2018) has time travel in it. However, since I figured this out very quickly, it is not a disastrous spoiler (I am usually very very slow to figure things out). And in any event, the time travel serves only to set in motion the paths that the characters must follow, and so reviewing of the book actually requires no further mention of it. Time travel ex machina, and on with the story, as it were.

The people who live in the kingdoms where Furyborn takes place once had a war against angels (who could, just as easily, have been called demons, but in any event--non-human beings of immense magical power who were not nice to humans). Against them rose saints--people with gifts of elemental magic, who were able to imprison the angels, and be at peace... for a while. But the prison has broken, and the war must be fought again.

Two young women, separated by centuries, find within them the magical powers such as the saints had wielded, fulfilling a prophecy foretelling two queens.  One will be a queen of light and salvation and the other a queen of blood and destruction. Rielle is sure that her command of all seven elemental forms of magic, and her fervent desire to protect her kingdom and those she loves, mean that she's the Sun Queen. But first she must endure seven trials to prove her magic, and her ability to control it. If she can't, she dies. A thousand years later, bounty hunter Eliana knows of Rielle only as a distant legend.  But Rielle's story continued long after she herself was gone, and now Eliana must pick up its pieces, and join the fight against the  (truly evil, loathsome, horrible) Undying Empire...And so she becomes a leader in the Rebellion, discovering that she, like Rielle, has magical gifts.

It's a pretty violent book, with rape and cruelty and death and lots of collateral damage. This isn't really my favorite thing to read about, but I kept on with increased interest--I liked Rielle's magical trials, and I liked Eliana's ethical dilemma (can someone who has done bad things be a good person?), and I'm all in favor of a good rebellion.  Claire Legrand has a true gift for making what she's writing about seem very real, and very immediate to the reader (which, given that what she's writing about often is rather horrible, is a mixed blessing).

For the most part, though, the book read like an extended introduction to the real story of the rebellion, which is just about to get going for reals when the book ends.  There's also more of Rielle's story to come as well.  So if you have patience for lots of magical and violent shenanigans that do more to set up the story than advance it, and love stories of girls discovering that they are powerful and magical, and finding love (and having sex), you might well love this one.  I was interested enough so that I'll want to read the next book, but I wasn't knocked off my feet.

The reviews are pretty polarized on Goodreads, which is interesting, but I put myself right in the middle.  Possibly because I'm not the teen girl demographic who is most passionate about books like these (I didn't, for instance, enjoy the Throne of Glass series).

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. 

Seven Stitches, by Ruth Tenzer Feldman, for Timeslip Tuesday

Seven Stitches, by Ruth Tenzer Feldman (Ooligan Press, Feb. 2017), is both a time travel story and a gripping YA novel about a girl coping with the loss of her mother that's set in a near future America.  The year is 2058, the place is Portland, and the global warming has not been kind, but has not yet been catastrophic. Meryam and her biologist mom live in a big old house and keep chickens and goats; things are much like now, only different in believable ways.  But then the earthquake hits, the Big One.  And Meryam's mom was down on the coast that day, and she doesn't come home.  Months pass with no word, but Meryam can't give up hope.  Her home has been filled by other people--her African American/Vietnamese/Jewish grandmother and her great aunt have moved in, people in need of shelter have been rehoused under her roof, and Bandon, a young man who's part of a forbidden organization fighting homelessness, has shown up to offer the services of his male goat to Meryam's surviving female one, and ends up staying too.

Meryam throws herself into the busyness of everyday life as best she can, but can barely distract from her conviction that her mother is still alive.  Reading along, I expected Bandon to be a typical YA distraction, and Meryam to find connections to her grandmother, and for her to find some big sense of purpose, and to an extent these things happen....except that Bandon is gay (and says so right at the beginning), her grandmother not really the connecting type, and her sense of purpose external to her own life is sort of a one shot deal.

But there's also the distraction of time travel.  A mysterious woman, Serakh, shows up out of nowhere in Meryam's house, explaining that women in past generations of Meryam's family have been in the habit of time travelling to do necessary things in the past, and that now she has come to take Meryam back in the past to do a necessary thing--to save a little girl in 16th century Constantinople from slavery.  And there in the past the thread of her own story is twisted, all to briefly, with a bit of her mother's.  Time travel with Serakh is made easy with universal language comprehension, and though there are difficulties and twists to the adventure in the past that made things interesting, I didn't read it with the same intent immersion as I did the story of Meryam's present day life.

That being said, it's a book I recommend with conviction (I read it first in January, and have just now read it again, and didn't mind in the least!) but I'm not convinced that the time travel is sufficiently integrated into the central narrative of Meryam's life.  I think that even if it were cut out completely, there'd still be a really good, really solid YA sci-fi-ish story to enjoy.  That being said, I didn't mind the time travel, and it does give both Meryam and the reader plenty of food for thought....but it was fairly mundane time travel compared to the details of Meryam's real life which I found much more interesting (this could be just me, as I tend to enjoy lots of description of mundane details of house and garden tasks, which is perhaps Sad, as Donald Trump would say, but there it is).  So in the end, I'd really suggest reading this one for a fascinating near future YA growing up/coping with grief story, at which it excels!

This is the third book by Ruth Tenzer Feldman about Serakh and the blue thread that binds her to Meryam's family, the others being Blue Thread, and The Ninth Day, both of which I'm going to look for now for future timeslip Tuesdays!

disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher