The first book (The Time Travelers) was an impulse buy. If you know me at all you can probably figure out why--I mean, hello, with a title like that it would have been really difficult to not buy it. Other points in its favor: it was a thick book in the Young Adults section (meaning mostly it wasn't one of those hilarious 100-pages-with-huge-font books that litter the section), it had a cool cover with two kids in what could conceivably be old-fashioned clothing (except, amusingly and relevantly, for their sneakers), and it was "Originally Published as Gideon the Cutpurse." Originally published suggests re-publication, which suggests quality! ...Well, I can come up with nearly any reason to justify an impulse buy.
I almost got both books then, in fact, but I managed to restrain myself. ...Only to actually be in the bookstore when I finished reading the first one, so I just went and bought the second. But a sequel is not an impulse buy when I've just finished reading the book before it!
Anyway, the books are good enough to not be in the YA section, which I guess is a mean thing to say about the YA section... and anyway the books were obviously written with that genre in mind, though this is a case where the "YA genre" does not hinder the storytelling at all--that is, the intended audience of children does not force the author to dumb it down at all. Rather, in fact, I found the books surprisingly deep and candid about some things... not, like, horrible violence or anything, but emotional trauma. Though more on that later. (To be honest, though, I don't know how much of it was this author and how much was just how long it's been since I've really read a good YA novel--The Phantom Tollbooth notwithsanding.)
Um... I'm going to be a bit more plot-spoilery than usual, 'cause there are some things I want to mention that would be really cumbersome to talk about without spoiling. So yeah.
Okay, so this jumps ahead to the second book technically, but for a trilogy called--at least in its U.S. publication--The Gideon Trilogy, the character of Gideon is really not central to the story. He's really important, mind you, but only (well, mostly) because of Peter. He's barely even in the second book. (By barely I don't mean he spends a lot of time off-screen, by barely I mean he doesn't even show up until the last chapter.) That said, he's going to be more important to the third (it's fairly obvious) and possibly the plot may end up more centered around him by the end. Meanwhile, while it would be fair to say that the main characters of the series are Peter and Kate (and of them, Peter more in the first book and Kate more in the second), this is one of those series that employs a whole bunch of characters well.
In fact, one of the things I found rather distinctive about these books is the freedom they took with point of view. The narration never actually slipped into omniscient mode, but it jumped heads a lot. It didn't even always wait for convenient things like chapter breaks--something as simple as a scene break, and the narration might suddenly be from the point of view of someone entirely different--someone somewhere else or even, because of the nature of the story, somewhen else. It actually works really well, I think in part because the narration never actually gets close enough into the heads of the characters to be bogged down by anything like establishing unique and distinctive modes of thought for each of them. The narration is its own style, merely tinted by whoever is doing the viewing at any given time.
This leads to two interesting consequences. The first is that the narration sometimes stays truer to the reader than to the viewpoint character. For example, a section might be viewed through the eyes of a character never mentioned before nor after who has had no prior contact with the main characters, but the narration, after establishing that the character sees people of a certain description, will switch to using their names (rather than continuing with the descriptions as monikers or somesuch) even though the viewpoint character never actually learned them. Every time this happens, it's a little bump to the internal consistency of the story, but the nature of the narration (as above) lets it go by smoothly rather than seriously disrupting it. The second consequence is that whenever the narration shifts to someone new and it doesn't immediately identify who--and the author is fond of immediately using pronouns--it's hard to figure out just who the viewpoint character is. I get the sense that this was intentional--I really doubt the author merely forgot to replace one of the pronouns with the name that many times. Rather I think she did it to create a sense of mystery... but unfortunately only confusion results. It's not terribly serious, because eventually the identity is always revealed, but it's an annoying and somewhat simple flaw in a series good enough to let something like that stand out.
Though while I'm on the subject of flaws, the second book (but not the first) has another, more serious flaw. A flaw that, unlike the above confusion, couldn't have been eliminated with a little careful editing and patience if the author had wanted to. The flaw is that a major subplot in the second book is just not interesting.
I call it a subplot, but really it's supposed to be one of two main plot threads. I consider it a subplot because I don't think enough time was spent on it to be on equal footing with the other plot thread... and at the same time I think too much time was spent on it that could have been spent on said other plot thread (i.e., the interesting stuff.) But this "subplot" is kind of really important... it's where the title (The Time Thief) comes from, and its entire purpose is to lead into the post-resolution disaster that leads into the third book. It's also just a logical progression in these kinds of stories--first people from our time go back in time, next people from the past come forward to our time. And it's always so much harder to get right than the first part.
When you've got characters going back in time, you can really do whatever you want--you could conceivably not do any research at all as long as readers aren't ever led to expect a realistic past. Characters can react to being in the past pretty much any way you want, too--it's all been done--though that will usually be dictated by the genre. But when people from the past come to the present, suddenly you have to get details right... and the character from the past has to react believably to the state of the world (technology, social customs, et cetera). This was the "subplot's" first problem--I just couldn't believe that an 18th-century outlaw could so easily elude modern police (on horseback, no less) that many times... until he figured out how to blur, which changed the rules entirely and is a plot-relevant term so you don't know what I'm talking about anymore. But still, before he found his "guide" to help him live in the "future," how was he doing anything? I find it hard to believe that anybody from the 18th century, no matter how cunning, could so easily adapt to modern life without help--so it's good that he did eventually get help, not so good that he did so well before that anyway.
Anyway, that' enough dwelling on the flaws. Let's talk about the awesomeness!
It was evident pretty quickly that the author made some really good choices when she figured out her characters for the book. You've got two kids going back in time, and the YA genre is not one that generally welcomes long angsty narration passage about how miserable the main character is being stuck in the past and how much they miss their family, et cetera. But it wouldn't be quite believable for a couple of twelve-year-olds to be thrown into the past and not feel that way. Some books (I'm looking at you, Castle in the Attic/Battle for the Castle) kind of skip over the angst thing--and, for many, justifiably so; in CitA/BftC the main character(s) get to the past-like land by shrinking and walking through the gate of a toy castle, for cryin' out loud. They can go back pretty much whenever they want. No separation anxiety necessary! Peter and Kate, meanwhile, have at first no idea what happened to them, end up alone, lost, and scared, and even once they've figured everything out they don't know if they'll ever get back home. There's got to be at least a little of that stuff or the books can say good-bye to emotional realism--which, hey, can work, but thankfully the books did not go that route.
...That was a very long-winded way of getting to explaining that, in order to keep the realism but avoid the angsty passages, the books let Kate be the one who freaks out. (A few times Peter notes, both in the narration and aloud, that Kate cries rather a lot in the first half or so of the first book. And wouldn't you, if you were a 12-year-old girl? Stuck in the past?) (I should mention that Kate's early crying fits, despite being a rather strong character (as in emotionally, not "good"), only serve to benefit her well-roundedness. Yay Kate?) Peter, meanwhile, is a lot calmer about the whole thing... because he feels estranged from his parents anyway. But rather than set that up to let him be all blasé or whatever, the author lets it stew for a while before having him start wondering things like whether his mother had even flown back from California yet--which, because the reader knows that she had to be convinced to wait even three hours after being told that Peter had gone missing, nicely propels his own emotional arc, independent yet not to the time travel angst Kate goes through.
Oh, the main bad guy gets a really effective introduction, too. He's all scary and stuff, and then... he almost cuts Kate's hair off. Though speaking of Kate's hair, it amuses me that it's red, if only because the number of female characters with red hair seems to be inversely proportional to the number of real live people with red hair... though to be fair, she lives somewhere where it's a little more normal.
To switch topics a little, in any story that uses time travel, I need to be satisfied by how the time travel is used or it will bug me long after I finish reading/watching/whatever. This ranges from explanation to execution to internal consistency. I'm very happy to say that this series gets full marks on its use of time travel! Let's go through this:
Explanation: First, what ends up being the time machine (to be colloquial) was never intended for that purpose, which neatly sidesteps the issues that come up when you have some guy trying to invent time travel and actually succeeding. Instead the time travel gets linked to dark matter, which seeing as it's one of those "who knows?" bits of modern science works very well at making it sound plausible yet completely made up. It certainly can't be disproven... yet... as far as I'm aware. Who knows, maybe dark matter-harnessing antigravity machines really will turn out to have time-travel applications!
Execution: One of the major problems that comes up in some time travel stories--mainly, the ones that rely on them being missing from home for an extended period--is "So, why couldn't they have just used their fancy time travel device to return home shortly after they left?" Many stories kind of ignore this, pretending that it's understood that the "present" is always moving forwards. Other (better, usually) stories actually take the time to explain why it might be impossible or impractical for the time travelers to return to right after they left, and/or why they're stuck returning to the "present" after the same amount of time has passed in the "present" as they've spent in the past. In this series, it never out and says it, but it's obvious to anyone who can read between the lines when the lines are spaced really far apart and the writing between them is huge: the "distance" travelled in time is determined by a particular setting on the antigravity device. It adds or subtracts that much time from its own "now"... they can't mess with the setting because they have no idea how to set it to any particular time. At least, at the start they don't...
Internal Consistency: It's internally consistent. Not much to talk about... hey, it lacks instances of breaking or changing its own rules, what fun!
But it all adds up to one of my favorite instances of time travel fiction in recent memory,and I eagerly await the [re]publication of the third book.
May 2009 Archives
This book is timeless, in pretty much every sense of the word. I read it way way back, in third or fourth grade, and it was wonderful then; when I spotted it in the bookstore I simply had to get it to reread it and it's still wonderful. And apparently it was written back in 1961! If you didn't know you'd never be able to tell.
The plot, of course, is very simple, but it was never meant to be a book full of twists and turns... at least, not plot twists and turns. Language twists and turns, very much so. It does the same kind of playing with English expressions as Un Lun Dun (remember that?) except... better, to put it bluntly. And first. And you know how I said it was timeless? I really hope English never grows out of the particular expressions the book uses, because then it would be more or less incomprehensible.
Now, the plot, such as it is, is mostly just a chain of lessons for Milo with some crazy experiences as buffer. But as much as I, reading it now, can look at it and think "Man, this is so transparently a book of lessons," the book disguises them so well that it was really easy to forget for a while as I was reading. It's just a great example of the whole head-fake thing(see: Randy Pausch for details). And you know what else? The lessons are still relevant. In fact, a few times while reading I had to stop and say to myself, "You know, the book is right, I really should[n't] be ____." And the lessons aren't all about how to grow up, or anything, nor are they about ignoring responsibility to have fun, or anything particularly kiddy. In fact it's one of the most well-rounded life-lessons books ever, especially with the perfect ending. Absolutely perfect.
I really can't praise this book enough. If you haven't read it since your childhood, you should seek it out and read it again. If you've never read it... find it immediately. You won't regret it.
