Yes, I'm hideously late, and I'm hideously embarrassed. But I've been busy.
Therefore, I am going to undertake a blend of both review and Wednesday Scrolls, both with the same subgenre of novel - Time Travel.
REVIEW:
Gideon Seymour, thief and gentleman, hides from the villainous Tar Man. — Suddenly the sky peels away like fabric and from the gaping hole fall two curious-looking children. Peter Schock and Kate Dyer have fallen straight from the twenty-first century, thanks to an experiment with an antigravity machine. Before Gideon and the children have a chance to gather their wits, the Tar Man takes off with the machine -- and Peter and Kate's only chance of getting home. Soon Gideon, Peter, and Kate are swept into a journey through eighteenth-century London and form a bond that, they hope, will stand strong in the face of unfathomable treachery.
That's all you need to know. For once, the back of a book perfectly sums up the action inside. Time traveling machine, two kids, accident, BOOM, eighteenth century.
Kate and Peter are the main characters, but how can you not love a guy whos
e title is 'Thief and Gentleman'? Gideon was truly the best character, that young-man-with-a-horrible-past-that-he's-trying-to-outrun-while-turning-over-a-new-leaf stereotype that only really bad authors can foul up. But the supporting characters were wonderful too, and the villain - The Tar Man - actually had a painful past. I found myself wincing when his backstory came around.
There are caveats. Buckley-Archer has a nasty habit of switching between point of views, usually Peter's and Kate's (though this usually works just as well as it did with, say, authors in the '40s and '50s because of Buckley-Archer's style). The ending wasn't quite as exciting as I had hoped. And I found the American woman's use of the word 'telly' for television hilarious. But those are minor in comparison to the rest of the amazing book. I squeal every time I think about it. Do yourself a favor, and read the book. (It's the first in The Gideon Trilogy; the second is called The Time Thief, and the third The Time Quake.)
WEDNESDAY'S SCROLLS
In the seemingly hit-and-miss realm of Time Travel literature, The Time Travelers is truly
amazing. Here are a couple of others that pull it off brilliantly.
I reviewed Robert Liparulo's Comes A Horseman a few months back. His adult novels are good, but his only YA series, Dreamhouse Kings, is really his magnum opus, in my humble opinion. In it, the King family - Ed and G, the parents, and kids Alexander, David, and Victoria - move to a small town in California, to an old fixer-upper house that gives Xander and David the creeps. Naturally, it gets worse than that - the house is actually a gigantic portal, with different doors leading to different periods in time. When Mrs. King is snatched into the time portals by an ancient enemy, the rest of the family has to pull together to figure out the rules of the Dreamhouse if they want to get their mother back.
Okay, okay, so it's the sixth book in a series. But it's an awesome book in an awesome series, so I think it deserves a mention.
In this book, Artemis's mother, Angeline, becomes ill with an unknown disease - a disease that turns out to be Spelltropy, usually a disease that only magical creatures can get. Only antidote? The brain fluid of the silky sifaka limur. Only problem? Artemis killed the last remaining lemur when he was ten. Only solution? Go back in time and prevent Artemis's younger self from killing the lemur. (If you can't guess from picturing Fourteen-Year-Old Artemis and Ten-Year-Old Artemis in a face-off, it's hilarious.)
So that's my Big Three of Time Travel. Do you have any other good T.T. books? If so, comment - I'd love to check them out!
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