Chuyển đến nội dung chính

The Last Beginning, by Lauren James, for Timeslip Tuesday

The Last Beginning, by Lauren James (YA, Sky Pony Press, 2018) is a joyful, chaotic romp of a time travel adventure that I devoured in a single sitting.

Clove, a Scottish teenager in 2051, gets hit with two emotional wrenches in one week.  Her best friend Meg, who she has a crush on, has just fallen in love with a boy, Clove's cousin.  On a more earthshaking note, Clove's parents tell her that she is adopted, and that her birth parents, Matt and Kate, are famous for saving the world from a bioterrorist threat developed by England, and then disappearing.  Clove sets the family's AI device, nicknamed Spart, to work trying to track them down (she is a whiz at computer programing).

And in the meantime, her mother has almost finished getting her time machine up and running.

Spart the AI delivers the strange information that  Matt and Kate keep showing up in history, starting in 1745.  So Clove decides that she will use the time machine to go back to find them, to try to figure out what happened to them and why they keep showing up a various crisis points of history.  The time machine works, and Clove becomes friends with Ella, a girl a little older.  She also meets then-Matt and then-Kate, and unfortunately changes the past.  When she returns to her own time, everything is horribly altered, and she starts disapparating...but a bit more time travel shenanigans patches things up.

I don't want to go into any more details about what happens next, but it involves lots more time travel, Ella and Clove falling in love (Ella keeps popping up....and has an interesting story of her own), and Matt and Kate saving the world....

I was very doubtful about how easy a time of it Clove had in 1745, but it turns out there's an explanation for this that made me smile.  And though there are many bifurcations and manipulations of time, I managed not to get overwhelmed with confusion.  Clove and Ella's romance is very sweet, as is the love between all the different Matt and Kates, and the love in Clove's nuclear family.  The story includes on-line exchanges between the characters, some from the future, including Clove's chats with Spart, and some steamy exchanges with Ella, and these lighten the weight of the world saving and time travel confusion very nicely, and made me chuckle.

This is the sequel to The Next Together, but it stands alone just fine, and quite possibly works better if you have never read that one (which is the story of Matt and Kate).  Not knowing the details of their lives makes the reader feel closer to Clove as she figures things out.  Although of course reading about Matt and Kate second might mean their story is less gripping...so really one should probably read both books first!

But in any event, I liked this one lots, and am glad to have an excellent lesbian sci fi time travel with smart girls saving the world to recommend! (we need more!)

Nhận xét

Đăng nhận xét

Popular Posts

The Wind Eye, by Robert Westall, for Timeslip Tuesday

This week's Timeslip Tuesday book is an older English one-- The Wind Eye , by Robert Westall (upper MG/YA 1976, still in print).  Westall's work ranges from picture books to adult, often exploring how the past hits the present in dark and mysterious ways.  Which is what happens in The Wind Eye.... It begins when a family, comprising a mother and her teenaged son married to a father with two daughters (one a young teen and one a little girl), setting off to the northeast coast of England to stay in the old house the father has just inherited.  They are not a happy family.  The kids get along fine, but the parents are not getting on well at all. And then the past and the present collide.   St. Cuthbert still is a real person to the people of this part of the Northumberland coast, and he becomes so to the kids as well when they find a boat that travels back to his time, taking them out to the island that was his retreat from the world.   Along the way, there's...
Đăng nhận xét
Đọc thêm

Conjured

by Sarah Beth Durst Eve is a girl placed in a special witness protection program that concentrates on people like her who can do magic.  They protect her and other strong magic-weilders from a mysterious serial killer who has been targeting people like them.  However, Eve cannot use her magic without blacking out and having visions of the Magician and the Storyteller, and she has no memory of her life before the witness protection, except for a few flashes here and there.  Often, when she blacks out, she'll lose days, weeks, or even months of her memories.  All she knows is that she is very important to the people trying to catch the serial killer, and they need her to remember her past. The plot developed slowly, but not in a bad way.  It took a while to figure out what was going on, but figuring it out was interesting.  The memory loss was done pretty well, and the characters were consistent and distinct.  Three of the characters - Aiden, Topher, and...
Đăng nhận xét
Đọc thêm

The Owls Have Come to Take Us Away, by Ronald L. Smith (review and interview)

I first had the pleasure of meeting Ronald L. Smith at Kidlitcon back in 2015 (PSA--come to Kidlitcon 2020 in Ann Arbor next March!).  His first middle grade book, Hoodoo, a tale of supernatural horror in the south, had just been published, and I enjoyed it very much ( my review ).  I likewise enjoyed The Mesmerist (2017), about kids fighting evil in 19th century London ( my review ).  I never reviewed Black Panther: the Young Prince (2018)….someday I will.  So in any event, I was very excited about his most recent book, The Owls Have Come to Take Us Away (Clarion Books, February 2019). This is the story of an air force kid, Simon, son of a black mom and a white dad, who's obsessed with aliens.  He's convinced owl-like aliens have arrived, watching and experimenting on humans.  His family has no time or patience for aliens, so Simon is alone with his fears of the Grays, as he calls them.  When something very strange happens on a camping trip with hi...
Đăng nhận xét
Đọc thêm