A mysterious agency singles out two teens for a dangerous mission to the past. Kate, who is white, swims for the high-school team; Michael, who is African-American, is a skilled equestrian. The two best friends find themselves chosen by the CyberTimeSurfing Institute to go back to 1778 to warn General Lafayette of a British trap and to save the life of Michael’s distant ancestor, John Banks, who rode with Lafayette. Any time-travel novel necessarily rests on a contrivance, but this novel, Favole’s debut, is more contrived than most. The need for the mission is so poorly justified—some unnamed alteration to the present/future as we know it will occur if the kids do not succeed—that there is no tension to the narrative at all. The very arbitrariness of it all guarantees that Michael and Kate will succeed, each using his or her special skills to accomplish the mission. Once in the past, these two modern teens have very little difficulty navigating a radically different environment from the one they’ve come from, winning against all credibility the near-instant trust of the French and Continental troops and playing a key role in the Battle of Barren Hill. The novel appears to have been written to highlight the strategic accomplishments of General Lafayette and to honor the African-Americans who fought with the patriots; an author’s note details the life of the real John Banks and Lafayette’s career. Unfortunately, the author’s note is ultimately more interesting than this predictable, didactic effort. (Fiction. 10-15)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-930826-00-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
Grand passion, terror, desire, comfort—it’s all here, and much of it is actual history, in Skurzynski’s spirited retelling of the story of Abelard and Eloise. The author can be forgiven some purple prose and melodramatic posturing on the narrator’s account: Aran is a mute shepherd rescued by Abelard himself from the horrors of an abusive family and then from a man who produces freaks on demand. Abelard, the mesmerizing 12th-century theologian and scholar, has need of a silent servant, as Aran—now called Spider—learns, because he is passionately in love with his student Eloise and their lessons have turned carnal. Spider keeps watch during their trysts, and travels with them when the pregnant Eloise goes to live with Abelard’s noble family. Eloise’s brilliance and beauty glow in these pages, along with Abelard’s reckless, self-centered intensity, and the harshness of peasant life. Spider is helpless to prevent Abelard’s castration by Eloise’s uncle, but that trauma leads him to find, eventually, a voice of his own. A great deal of information about medieval France, gore that won’t disturb the more hardened in the audience, and a famed love story will hold readers and send them to the sources cited at the end. (map) (Fiction. 12-15)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-689-82149-2
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
A girl’s interest in family history overlaps a coming-of-age story about her vestigial understanding of her mother after death, and her own awareness of self and place in the world. Junior high-school student Carrie Schmidt identifies strongly with the missing girls of 1967’s headlines about runaways. Carrie’s mother is dead and she has just moved in with her grandmother, Mutti, who embarrasses her with her foreign accent and ways. Carrie’s ideal is her friend Mona’s mother, a “professional” who dresses properly, smells good, and knows how to set out a table; readers will grasp the mother’s superficiality, even though Carrie, at first, does not. Mutti has terror in her past, and tells Carrie stories of the Jews in WWII Vienna, and of subsequent events in nine concentration camps; these are mined under the premise that Carrie needs stories for “dream” material and her interest in so-called lucid dreaming, a diverting backdrop that deepens the story without overwhelming it. Mutti’s gripping, terrible tales and the return of an old friend who raised Carrie’s mother when she was sent to Scotland at age nine awaken in Carrie a connection to her current family, to her ancestry, and, ultimately, to a stronger sense of self. This uncommon novel from Metzger (Ellen’s Case, 1995, etc.) steps out of the genre of historical fiction to tell a story as significant to contemporary readers as to the inhabitants of the era it evokes. (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-87777-8
Page Count: 194
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
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