Fluttering Butterflies

The first book in the Camelot Code series, The Once and Future Geek , mixed time travel between the medieval world of King Arthur and our own, and it is a very entertaining book.  The second book in the series, Geeks and Holy Grail (Hyperion, October 2019), is also entertaining (though not quite as funny; King Arthur as a modern day high school student is hard to beat....). When Morgana, sworn enemy of King Arthur, attacks the druids of Avalon, Nimue, the youngest of them, takes the Holy Grail and runs with it.  King Arthur is dying, and only the Grail can save him.  Desperate to keep it from falling into Morgana's hands, she stumbles into Merlin's Crystal Cave.  But instead of Merlin there to help her (he's on vacation in Los Vegas, in our time), there's only his very inexperienced apprentice, Emrys.  His attempt to hide the grail works, in a sense--as a small, flatulent dragon, it sure doesn't look much like a grail.  But it isn't much use to Arthur as a...

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...

The Obsidian Compass , by Liesl Shurtliff (middle grade, Katherine Tegan Books, Oct 2019) continues the time travelling adventures of three siblings adventuring through time that began with The Mona Lisa Key (link goes to my review).  That first book ended with Mateo, Ruby, and Corey getting home again safely, after many dangerous and difficulties aboard a time travelling ship captained by a ruthless man who was trying to use Matteo, in particular, for his own selfish purposes. But getting home safe wasn't to be the end of their time travelling.  Mateo needs to find his friend, Jia, one of Captain Vincent's crew, who was in danger of being dumped somewhere in time by the captain after she crossed him to help Mateo and his siblings.  Captain Vincent still has the obsidian compass that allows him to time travel, so Mateo decides to try to make his own, and against all odds, he succeeds.  But when he starts using it, he gets his family snarled anew in danger. As they ...

For the past 10 years I've been posting reviews of kids and YA time travel and time slip books on (most) Tuesdays ( 413 of them to date ), and I thought it would be fun on this last Tuesday of 2019 that is also the decade's last day do go through the c 250 time travel books I've reviewed in these past 10 years and pick ten favorites published between Jan.1 2010 and today. It was indeed fun to remember all the books, and it was fun in a nostalgic way to be reminded of the close-knit blogisphere I was part of back in the day (we all linked to each other's reviews, for instance...), but boy is it excruciating to be confronted with my poorly edited prose!  I dash off my posts and hit send before I can change my mind, and it shows.  I am sorry.   It was hard to choose just ten, and I really wanted to include one from 2009 too ( The Hotel Under the Sand , by Kage Baker), but I managed...The links are to my reviews.  I will try to come back tomorrow morning to add pictures ...

Gee.  The past few weeks have been the longest I've ever gone without reviewing anything since my blog started over a decade ago.  But I got the pre-Thanksgiving home renovations that needed finishing finished (mostly), got the house clean (mostly) and had a lovely time with my dear extended family!  And now I'm back, easing myself in gently with a picture book review... The Trouble with Time Travel, by Stephen W. Martin, illustrated by Cornelia Li (Owlkids, October 15, 2019), is a charming (though stressful) story of Max and her dog Boomer, and a too-enthusiastically thrown Frisbee that shatters a family heirloom, the one thing saved from the mysterious sinking of her many-times great-grandmother's houseboat.  Max decides that the only thing to do about the shattered vase is to build a time machine, and go back in time to smash the vase before it ended up in her living room. Happily, building a time machine is but the work of minutes (a nice bit of girl engineering ...

Throwback , by Peter Lerangis (HarperCollins, October 2019), is a riveting middle grade time travel story about a kid who can change the past. Corey is used to being told he has an active imagination, and he used to noticing odd things, so when he sees an old picture in his friend Leila's house, and finds himself in what seems to be New York 100 years in the past, he thinks it's just part of the movie he knows is being filmed in his neighborhood.  Or possibly a hallucination.  It's not, though.   Corey's actually travelled though time.  And he is one of a very small group who can actually change things in the past. His grandfather is also a time traveler, who can't change things.  He tells Corey how he's gone, over and over again, back to 9/11, to try to keep his wife from going to work in the World Trade Center that day.  And of course, when Corey's talent emerges, the possibility that he might be able to save her occurs to them both....the possibility tha...

If you are in the mood for a real page turner of a YA time travel story (it only took me two and a bit hours to read 400 pages), with lots of twists, lots of great characters, and lots of action, look no further than Stolen Time, by Danielle Rollins (Febraury 2019, HarperTeen). It begins in Seattle, in 1913, when Dorothy runs away from the marriage her con-artist mother has inveigled her into.  Her flight leads her to a time traveler, from New Seattle, 2077.  Ash is on a mission to find his mentor, the professor who figured out time travel technology, and who disappeared. leaving his team of young people gathered from different times without guidance and purpose.  Dorothy stows away in his ship, and Ash inadvertently takes her back to his own time, to a city devastated by earthquakes and inundated by tidal waves. It's a city living in fear of a vicious gang, whose co-leader, Roman, was once one of the professor's brightest students.  But Roman wanted time travel to ...

The Shores Beyond Time , by Kevin Emerson, is the third book in the Chronicle of the Dark Star series that began with Last Day on Mars , and continued in The Oceans Between Stars (links to my reviews).   Basically the premise is humanity, and an alien race with whom humanity is at war, are out among the stars after our sun went nova (and some other stars have too), both races looking for new homes (the aliens because humanity decided the Telphon's planet would be a great new home, and essentially nuked it, so there are only about three hundred of them left).  One human boy, Liam, and one Telphon girl, who goes by Phoebe, became friends on Mars and Liam met an ancient time travelling alien of a different species (as told in the first book) and were both separated from their people on a long lonely space flight, and Liam started travelling in time himself (the second book). In this third book, Liam and Phoebe find themselves at the heart of the mystery of the supernovas and the...

Sometimes time gets slippy, and even with the best intentions in the world, Tuesdays come to an end before one's post is written.  So here's the (very good) time travel book that was supposed to be up yesterday! A Time Traveler's Theory of Relativity , by Nicole Valentine (Carolrhoda, middle grade, Oct 1 2019) is indeed about time travel, but mostly it's about a boy, Finn.   Finn's twin sister drowned when they were three, and the hole in his family is still there, though Finn only remembers fragments of her.  Now Finn's mother has left home, with no message or explanation, leaving him with his absent-minded historian dad, who won't talk about it, and who then heads off on a research trip, leaving Finn with his grandmother.  Happily, his best friend Gabi lives nearby, and she has his back, and his grandma is loving, warm, and caring.  She also knows where his mother is, although she doesn't come out and tell him immediately...and when she does, it's ...

This is How You Lose the Time War , by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone ( July 2019, Gallery / Saga Pres) , is an epistolary love story between two agents (Red and Blue) on either side of a time war that stretches millennia in both directions.  Red and Blue are skilled at manipulating the strings of time, braiding them into patterns that will result in the desired outcomes of the two very different futures that spawned them. But when they begin a correspondence that starts as a taunting challenge, they find that they are braiding themselves together, tugging each other toward a future that seems impossible. It's not a doorstopper of a book (198 pages), so I thought it would be a fast read, but it's not, because all the words deserve consideration, and it's so rich in literary allusions and historical details and epistolary conceits that it demands to be savored.  It' s a very complicated sort of time travel (constant back and forth manipulation of history can make my he...

The Moon Over Crete , by Jyotsna Sreenivasan (1996, Smooth Stone Press), is a slightly older children's time travel story, interesting for several reasons. It's the story of a modern girl, 11-year-old Lily, whose mom is Indian American, and whose dad is European American.  Lily is finding it difficult being a girl--her best friend is interested in dressing to impress boys, a boy in her class is sexually harassing her and no one is doing anything about it, her mother isn't letting her do things (like go exploring off in the woods) that she'd be allowed to do if she were a boy.  Lily's flute teacher, Mrs. Zinn, is the only one who seems to understand Lily's growing resentment. And happily for Lily, Mrs. Zinn is a time-traveler, fond of visiting ancient Crete, where (in this fictional world) there is almost utopian gender equality.  Mrs. Zinn offers Lily the chance to go to ancient Crete with her for a few weeks,  and Lily accepts.  Having an experienced adult guid...

Delia and her cohort of kids training at the Time Museum to journey across the ages are back in another adventure-- The Time Museum, Vol. 2 , by Matthew Loux (First Second, June 2019).  This graphic novel has all the brightly illustrated fun and excitement of the first volume ( my review ), and even more danger and suspense. Delia and the other kids are getting ready for their next time travel mission, with the help of none other than Richard Nixon.  Nixon is a surprisingly capable instructor, and the tips and tricks he provides during training come in very useful indeed when things start going wrong.  Their mission sounded straightforward--travel back to 18th century Versailles to patch up French/US diplomatic relations, but it quickly becomes complicated by a temporal loop that brings future versions of themselves back in time too.  And then things become very strange indeed when all of them travel to a dystopian future, where an old enemy awaits.... I have to conf...

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 universi...

Though I enjoy current fantasy lots and lots, my true comfort readers are mid-twentieth century UK fiction.  And so when I was given a copy of Caravan Holiday, by Hilda Boden (1953), I was very pleased, and when I found out it was an archaeological timeslip story, I should have been even more pleased, but the sad fact of the matter is that it wasn't great. Timothy and Susan are spending the summer holiday in a caravan on a farm by the seaside, while their archaeologist parents investigate a possible stone age site.  They find a secluded little valley with  stream, where Timothy decides to build his own house, and perhaps even camp there.   A strange boy, Noor, shows up, who seems to know everything about building small temporary structures, starting fires, hunting animals, and other useful things.  Gradually it becomes clear that he's slipping through time from Neolithic England.... Join Timothy as he gets his archaeologist father's ideas about gender roles of t...

Young fans of ancient Egypt will find much to enjoy in Jagger Jones and the Mummy's Ankh , by Malayna Evans (Month9Books, May, 2019), although it didn't quite work for me. Jagger Jones is a biracial kid from Chicago who loves learning about the past, preferably from the comfort of his own home.  Unfortunately for Jagger, his mother and little sister, Aria, are both passionate about adventuring, and he's dragged around the world in their wake.  In Egypt, Jagger wakes one night to hear a voice calling out to him, and he follows it outside, followed in turn  by Aria, though she can't hear the voice.  Jagger digs into the ground to find its source, and the two kids find themselves in an undisturbed ancient Egyptian burial chamber, with a golden ankh, the source of the voice, resting on a mummy.  When Aria grabs hold of the ankh, they find themselves back in the time of Akhenaten, the pharaoh who rejected the Egyptian pantheon and set up his own religion. Akhenaten's...

One Word Kill, by Mark Lawrence (47North, May 2019) , is a time travel story in which changes to the past create multiple timelines.  It's the story of 15 year old Nick, a math genius who enjoys playing D. and D. with his three buddies, and what happens when a girl, Mia, joins the game.  It's the story of Nick finding out he has cancer.  These concerns, even the fact that Nick might be dying, are back-burnered when a strange man starts stalking Nick, telling him that Mia is in danger and needs his help. Saving future Mia involves a dangerous heist, and it also involves surviving the violent attentions of a gang of drug-dealing thugs, one of whom is a true psychopath.  Fortunately, the strange man is there to help when things get really ugly. Turns out (and this isn't much of a spoiler, because it's told to the reader fairly early on) that this stranger is Nick from the future, come back to save future Mia.  Though his timeline's Mia might be in jeopardy, ther...

For those of us for whom summer feels faintly unreal, with its langerous heat and the disaloution of the routines of the school year, and all the work that needs doing outside, here's a romantic timeslip story of in which reality does indeed become unraveled. The Square Root of Summer , by Harriet Reuter Hapgood (Roaring Brook Press 2016), is a story of a teenaged girl's grief and growing-up, the wormholes that are moving her back and for from her past to her present, and her efforts to understand what's happening through math and introspection.  Last summer, Gottie (short for Margot) lost her grandfather, the cornerstone of her family. Before that, she lost her childhood soulmate, Thomas, when he moved away and left her with a hole in her memory. After that, she lost her heart to her older brother's friend Jason, who ended up dumping her. Now Thomas and Jason are both back in her life, but she is unsure of where her heart stands in relationship to them. And her bot...

The Opposite of Always , by Justin A. Reynolds (Katherine Tegan Books, March 2019), is a sweet, funny, poignant time travel YA with a lot going on in its briskly turning pages. Jack, a high school senior, and Kate, a college freshman, meet and fall hard for each other.  Their chemistry is immediate, and their enjoyment of each other's company seems to Jack to promise the possibility to love.  Jack's two best friends, Franny, the boy he's been best buddies with forever, and Jillian, the best friend he was in love with before she started going out with Frannie, hit it off with Kate when they finally get to meet her, and all seems golden when she agrees to go to prom with Jack.  B ut then Kate doesn't show up on prom night, and Jack is only just able to find her in the hospital to say good-bye before she dies from complications of sickle cell anemia. That isn't the end of the story.  Jack loops back in time to meet her all over again.  Over and over, trying to save...

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 tr...

Here's a fun timeslip story for kids that mixes computer gaming with the story of King Arthur and medieval magic-- The Camelot Code: The One and Future Geek , by Mari Mancusi (Disney-Hyperion, November 2018). The time has come for Arthur to pull the sword from the sword and become king!  But when Guinevere, his best friend, accidently drops a magical treasure down Merlin's enchanted well, and Arthur tries to get it back, he falls in himself....and travels through time to our present.  Merlin has set up the well to serve as a connection to the modern era, where he enjoys the benefits of Wifi, and plays an online fantasy game, Camelot's Honor, with two ordinary kids, Sophie and Stu. When Merlin realizes he's lost Arthur to the future, he calls Sophie and Stu back into the past.  With the help of Merlin's magic, Stu becomes a stand-in for Arthur, and Sophie goes back to the present to try to bring him back before the future is irrevocably changed.  And Guinevere travel...