YA Time Travel!

Summer is a difficult time to crank out weekly posts, I’ll be honest. So much more going on here than in the dead of upstate NY winter.

But the book has been sent for formatting after final edits and I’m hoping cover materials are forthcoming. I’m excited for this to feel real.

In other news, the chicks I brought home at the end of April as sweet fluff balls have evolved into chirpy poop machines that don’t want to be told what to do. Much like toddlers. Also, as someone who didn’t grow up raising chickens, I was unaware of the delicacy of integrating them with the biddies (not a real term for hens just what I call my current adults). There’s literally a pecking order being established and all sorts of drama, which I suppose makes them more like teenagers, when they go in the coop at night. They spend the day in a temporary run until they can’t be bossed so hard during the day and they need to fill out into their fluffy butt glory to make this possible. I feel much of life is achieved after we have managed to grow into our own fluffy butts. Such an unexpected metaphor for life, these birds.

So this book review goodness is about time travel in YA novels. I love visiting other time periods via reading, although my own book is set in present day. I think writing historical fiction would be a fun blend of academic study and the creativity of writing, but there isn’t space for that at this moment in my life. I’ll devour all I can read, though.

The Girl from Everywhere, Heidi Heilig

Nix is the daughter of a time traveling sailor who traverses the globe through different places in history. They are on a quest to get back to the right time and place to save her mother, who dies after giving birth to her, when Dad was out on the sea. 

That’s the simplest way I can boil down the plot of this ambitious novel. Time travel involves so many rules, worldbuilding and setup I can’t imagine trying to write time travel.  I liked especially that a chunk of this story is in Hawaii right before it was annexed by the US. That has definitely been a time period/location I have not read about before and the writer spends a lot of time on the historical context, and I freakin love that sort of thing. It was really well done for the time traveling rules and the characterization, the father addicted to finding the one map that will bring him back to his true love, and a girl that belongs nowhere and is longing, like many teens, to strike out on her own and make her own roots, because she really does not have any.  I can see where this book would be relatable to kids who feel they have never really had a home, or had a complicated relationship with a distracted parent who nevertheless loves them.  It was really well done, if a complicated book as well.

Passenger, Alexandra Bracken

Etta Spencer believes that she is performing on her violin when she is hurtled into another dangerous world in a different time period against her will.  She was unaware of her family’s time traveling legacy and is entwined in a dangerous plot, one in which she needs to save the mother who kept this from her until now.  Enter Nicholas Carter, a boy of uncertain place in the world, playing a double agent against Etta in the race to find a priceless object before it is used for nefarious purposes.

If any female wants to read this book to get lost in the romance of being a woman in a “simpler” time, this is not the book for them!  Etta may skip between time periods and have an enviable gift, but she remains at the mercy of men and their whims as she skips through time, trying to figure out this mystery and solving it before her opponent, the dangerous Ironwood family.  She’s forced into heavy, restrictive clothing, and she has to do what others tell her or be stuck as a beggar woman in a context she doesn’t understand, let alone be able to navigate.  She lives a step away from disaster at every turn.  To be fair, Nicholas, her partner, isn’t made of options either, albeit more probably than she does.  Everyone is trapped in someone else’s circumstance.  I would hate it.  The story is twisty and intriguing and the worldbuilding and rules of time travel are outlined but still allow for some surprises as you go, and I like being surprised by a story, not just reading along.  This book was intense, though.  It wasn’t feel good and it doesn’t completely resolve, so if you need those things in a book (and sometimes I do and sometimes I do not), this is not the book for you.  It’s well done, it just depends on what you as a reader are looking for in a read.

So much awesome YA out there. I could only read that genre and be happy, but I’m definitely more widely read.

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