Washed back nearly five-and-a-half centuries by a sudden tsunami in the usually placid Ocean of Time, pre-teen siblings Susan and Charles, first introduced in Drift House (2005), tackle a space/time storm (confusingly mislabeled a “time jetty”) that is leaving a trail of destruction stretching from the Twin Towers through Pompeii and Atlantis to ancient Babylon. Once again lacing his tale with inscrutable elements—including at least one (possibly more) strong-willed magical volume(s) and at least one (ditto) other-than-human time “Returner” who single-handedly fills out the cast with multiple appearances in various guises—Peck plunges the separated Susan and Charles into contrived encounters with Pre-Columbian residents of Greenland and North America, and then on to twin cataclysmic climaxes over modern Manhattan (for Susan) and beneath the Tower of Babel (for Charles), before a final happy reunion aboard their ship-like Quebec mansion. Floating thinly atop its opaque, anthropocentric metaphor (“The jetty is a manifestation of the eternal human desire to cheat time, to get to the end without going through the middle,” explains the Returner, with typical clarity), the sequel is as likely as its predecessor to leave readers at sea. (Fantasy. 11-13)
Pub Date: March 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-58234-859-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
Miah’s melodramatic death overshadows a tale as rich in social and personal insight as any of Woodson’s previous books.
In a meditative interracial love story with a wrenching climactic twist, Woodson (The House You Pass on the Way, 1997, etc.) offers an appealing pair of teenagers and plenty of intellectual grist, before ending her story with a senseless act of violence.
Jeremiah and Elisha bond from the moment they collide in the hall of their Manhattan prep school: He’s the only child of celebrity parents; she’s the youngest by ten years in a large family. Not only sharply sensitive to the reactions of those around them, Ellie and Miah also discover depths and complexities in their own intense feelings that connect clearly to their experiences, their social environment, and their own characters. In quiet conversations and encounters, Woodson perceptively explores varieties of love, trust, and friendship, as she develops well-articulated histories for both families. Suddenly Miah, forgetting his father’s warning never to be seen running in a white neighborhood, exuberantly dashes into a park and is shot down by police. The parting thought that, willy-nilly, time moves on will be a colder comfort for stunned readers than it evidently is for Ellie.
Miah’s melodramatic death overshadows a tale as rich in social and personal insight as any of Woodson’s previous books. (Fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-399-23112-9
Page Count: 181
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
Much rousing sturm und drang, though what’s left after the dust settles is a heap of glittering but disparate good parts...
Scott tops off his deservedly popular series with a heaping shovelful of monster attacks, heroic last stands, earthquakes and other geological events, magic-working, millennia-long schemes coming to fruition, hearts laid bare, family revelations, transformations, redemptions and happy endings (for those deserving them).
Multiple plotlines—some of which, thanks to time travel, feature the same characters and even figures killed off in previous episodes—come to simultaneous heads in a whirl of short chapters. Flamel and allies (including Prometheus and Billy the Kid) defend modern San Francisco from a motley host of mythological baddies. Meanwhile, in ancient Danu Talis (aka Atlantis), Josh and Sophie are being swept into a play to bring certain Elders to power as the city’s downtrodden “humani” population rises up behind Virginia Dare, the repentant John Dee and other Immortals and Elders. The cast never seems unwieldy despite its size, the pacing never lets up, and the individual set pieces are fine mixtures of sudden action, heroic badinage and cliffhanger cutoffs. As a whole, though, the tale collapses under its own weight as the San Francisco subplots turn out to be no more than an irrelevant sideshow, and climactic conflicts take place on an island that is somehow both a historical, physical place and a higher reality from which Earth and other “shadowrealms” are spun off.
Much rousing sturm und drang, though what’s left after the dust settles is a heap of glittering but disparate good parts rather than a cohesive whole. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-73535-3
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
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