Chuyển đến nội dung chính

Waking in Time, by Angie Stanton, for Timeslip Tuesday

Waking in Time, by Angie Stanton (Capstone 2017), is a timeslip story set at college, combining two things I love in books! The start of Abbi's freshman year at UW Madison, where her grandmother and great-grandmother had both studied, is not as happy as she'd thought it would be. She is still grieving the recent death of her grandmother, and this casts a shadow over all the things she'd been looking forward to.

But she doesn't get any time to feel at home. The second morning there, she wakes up to find herself in the same college dorm, but in 1983. And as the book progresses, she keeps moving quickly back in time. Then she wakes to find her own grandmother is her room-mate. She's thrilled to get the chance to be with her grandmother again, and wonders if she'll find a clue about her dying request to "find the baby." And then she meets her great-grandmother, and finds out a sad truth about her family. Meanwhile, Will who started at the university in 1927 is traveling forward through time, and despite not recognizing each other at the far ends of their journeys, Will and Abbi become more than friends.

But how can they stop traveling, and find a time where they can stay together? Fortunately, there's another almost constant person they both meet--the brilliant professor at the future end of the timeline, who's an insecure student toward the beginning of it...and who specializes in the quantum physics of time travel.

I found the various different glimpses of the women's dormitory life fascinating, but they didn't interest Abbi as much as they interested me. She was most interested in Will (which didn't interest me that much; there wasn't quite enough meat to their relationship for my taste, being basically physical attraction and a shared problem), and in solving the family mystery, which wasn't all that mysterious. I wanted Abbi to be more curious and engaged with each different time period in a historical/anthropological way, and she just wasn't. In fact, she doesn't seem to be interested in anything at all intellectual. Oh well. She is, after all, in a rather deperate situation, so I cut her lots of slack in that regard.

Something that more actively bothered me was the implication of Native American sacred sites as one of the causes of the time travel (one of the mounds was levelled to build the women's dorm) which I thought was unnecessary and which invoked a sense of "mystical Indians" which I found unpleasant.

 But if you are a fan of fate bringing soul-mates together, you may well enjoy this more than I did! (Judging from the numerous five star reviews on Goodreads, it seems to be the case that cynical older readers who love academia and detailed minutia about the material culture of the past  are not the best audience for it....)

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 Dragon Thief, by Zetta Elliott

In Dragons in a Bag (link to my review), Zetta Elliott introduced a  young boy named Jaxon, who was given a job to do by a magical old woman, Ma.  He had to return three baby dragons to the world of magic.  It didn't go as planned, not that Jaxon knew enough about what was going on to really "plan" anything, but he did his best.  It wasn't enough.  One of the babies was stolen by Kavita, the little sister of his best friend, Vik. The Dragon Thief   (Random House, Oct 22 1019) picks up the story right where we left it.  Jaxon is worried about Ma, who has fallen into a strange sleep, and he's desperate to get the baby dragon to the magical world.  Kavita is worried about the baby dragon, which grows at an alarming rate when it gets fed.  When she realizes she can't keep it safe, her old aunty who lives with her family decides to help her get it home. So on the one hand we have Jaxon and Vik, racing to find Kavita while figuring out how they ca...
Đăng nhận xét
Đọc thêm