Fluttering Butterflies

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...

The past few days have been rather harrowing, and I needed something soothing and mindless to read, that came with no obligation or expectation.  I picked The Secret Spring: a Mystery Romance for Young People , by Emma Atkins Jacobs (1944) off my to-be-read pile; I picked it up from my local used bookstore a few months ago, and thought it looked undemanding. And indeed, it made no demands (except on my credulity) and actually proved more enjoyable than I thought it would. The spring in the title isn't the season, but a hardware type spring in an old trunk, that our heroine, 16-year old Laurel, impulsively buys at an auction, and what's in the trunk when the secret spring is secret no more is what sparks the mystery, such as it is (not much--two strangers are much too interested in the trunk).  Indeed, though the book advertises itself as a mystery romance, it's really about a shy girl in a musical family who are on tour for the summer in the Chautauqua circuit, who pushes h...

Last of Her Name , by Jessica Khoury, is a an excellent sci fi adventure for any fans of the fall of the Romanovs and the possibility that Anastasia survived, and a good one simply for those who enjoy sci-fi adventure featuring strong female leads! Stasia has spent her sixteen years roaming her father's vineyard with her dear friends Pol and Clio on a peaceful planet, one of a group known as the Belt of Jewels.  These planets were settled by humanity eons ago, and each went its own way until they were united through the communicative power of prisms and the family of scientists who discovered that power and became Emperors.   But sixteen years ago, the ruling family was overthrown, and now the planets are  held in the tight fist of  the Direktor Eminent and his Union henchmen. When a union ship unexpectedly lands in Stasia's home town, on a mission to find the one daughter of the last emperor who might have survived, her life is upended.  The Direktor himself ha...