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Rating: 
Summary: Excellent
Review: Beth Bosworth juxtaposes vividly imaged fantasy and hyper-reality in this story of a world hovering between destruction and fragile salvation. Rachel Finch, a twelve year old booklover, joins forces with superhero S-man to save literary history. In between her travels through time and space, Rachel must cope with growing up in 1960's New Jersey, where her family and "model town" are coming apart at the seams.The fantasy portions of this book are so well rendered that they have the pure ring of myth, and Rachel's everyday reality is evoked with all the harrowing immediacy of childhood in an era of environmental threat and social change. Moving back and forth between these two worlds, the story builds steadily toward a spectacular climax in which they collide, quite literally raising the roof. Give this one a try!
Rating: 
Summary: better idea than execution
Review: Rachel Finch is a dual-level time traveler. In half the book, she travels through time in the normal fashion of a coming-of-age story. In another part of the book she literally (and literarily) travels in time with "S-Man" on "rescue missions" to writers as Shakespeare, Wilde, Voltaire, among others. Though the dangers are more obvious in her travels to other times and places, anyone who has experienced middle and high school won't be surprised to find that those journeys are equally perilous.
The book starts off with one of the best openings I've read in a while. Unfortunately, it gradually loses its promise. The set fantasy pieces read great in outline/sketch form (save Shakespeare from writer's block by inspiring The Tempest, see what happens when Voltaire and Rousseau are forced to share the cramped confines of a wardrobe, etc.) but on the full page they never quite satisfy, almost as if most of the energy came in the brainstorming, leaving the author a bit too tired to put it into the actual writing. The scenes' brevity exacerbates the problem because you seldom get to see the historical figures as doing more than quickly playing their parts as historical figures. Because they don't come across as fully fleshed people, both the characters and our meetings with them fall flat. The same is true of S-Man--a character crying out for more time and substance. Well-read readers will enjoy the literary jokes and will like seeing familiar faces in somewhat unfamiliar settings, but it is more the small sense of enjoyment one gets at the mall by seeing an acquaintance going up the escalator while you go down than that of seeing a good friend in a pub window and popping in to share a glass and some laughs.
Bosworth does a better job with the real-time scenes, strongly conveying the depth and range of emotions that play out during those early and middle teen years. Layered on top of the typical adolescent angst and family problems are issues of civil rights and the environment, both of which are smoothly integrated into the storylines.
Weaving back and forth between Rachel's dual lives (stopping now and then for some unnecessary and detracting authorial intrusions), Bosworth brings both plotlines crashing (again, literally) together in an ending that came across as forced and that once again seemed to fall flat in comparison to its potential.
One running problem I had with the novel is that I too often felt bounced about between not just scenes but actual lines, almost as if someone had somehow stolen my copy and whited out transitional dialogue or internal monologue or even full scenes. It is rare that I have the feeling as I'm reading that I don't know why people are doing what they are doing or saying what they are saying, but I felt that in multiple scenes in this book. I'm sure this "bounced around" feeling also contributed to the lack of emotive impact of many of the novel's scenes.
Looking back on the book, the weakest parts by far were the time-travel sections, but while the real-time scenes were better, they were not good enough to carry this as simply a regular coming-of-age novel, perhaps partly because scenes that could carry more weight--both in terms of plot and character/plot development were sacrificed to the time-travel scenes. And it is the time-traveling literary aspect of the book that piqued my curiosity in the first place and which so excited me as a reading prospect--I would have hated to have had someone tell Bosworth early on to simply drop them and write your everyday coming-of-age text. Instead, I think she needed someone to say--"great idea, but can you keep working on it?" Maybe it was just too ambitous a project for a debut novel. I'd love to see it again ten years from now after she writes another novel or three and then takes this one out of the drawer again. But in this version, I can't recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: better idea than execution
Review: Rachel Finch is a dual-level time traveler. In half the book, she travels through time in the normal fashion of a coming-of-age story. In another part of the book she literally (and literarily) travels in time with "S-Man" on "rescue missions" to writers as Shakespeare, Wilde, Voltaire, among others. Though the dangers are more obvious in her travels to other times and places, anyone who has experienced middle and high school won't be surprised to find that those journeys are equally perilous.
The book starts off with one of the best openings I've read in a while. Unfortunately, it gradually loses its promise. The set fantasy pieces read great in outline/sketch form (save Shakespeare from writer's block by inspiring The Tempest, see what happens when Voltaire and Rousseau are forced to share the cramped confines of a wardrobe, etc.) but on the full page they never quite satisfy, almost as if most of the energy came in the brainstorming, leaving the author a bit too tired to put it into the actual writing. The scenes' brevity exacerbates the problem because you seldom get to see the historical figures as doing more than quickly playing their parts as historical figures. Because they don't come across as fully fleshed people, both the characters and our meetings with them fall flat. The same is true of S-Man--a character crying out for more time and substance. Well-read readers will enjoy the literary jokes and will like seeing familiar faces in somewhat unfamiliar settings, but it is more the small sense of enjoyment one gets at the mall by seeing an acquaintance going up the escalator while you go down than that of seeing a good friend in a pub window and popping in to share a glass and some laughs.
Bosworth does a better job with the real-time scenes, strongly conveying the depth and range of emotions that play out during those early and middle teen years. Layered on top of the typical adolescent angst and family problems are issues of civil rights and the environment, both of which are smoothly integrated into the storylines.
Weaving back and forth between Rachel's dual lives (stopping now and then for some unnecessary and detracting authorial intrusions), Bosworth brings both plotlines crashing (again, literally) together in an ending that came across as forced and that once again seemed to fall flat in comparison to its potential.
One running problem I had with the novel is that I too often felt bounced about between not just scenes but actual lines, almost as if someone had somehow stolen my copy and whited out transitional dialogue or internal monologue or even full scenes. It is rare that I have the feeling as I'm reading that I don't know why people are doing what they are doing or saying what they are saying, but I felt that in multiple scenes in this book. I'm sure this "bounced around" feeling also contributed to the lack of emotive impact of many of the novel's scenes.
Looking back on the book, the weakest parts by far were the time-travel sections, but while the real-time scenes were better, they were not good enough to carry this as simply a regular coming-of-age novel, perhaps partly because scenes that could carry more weight--both in terms of plot and character/plot development were sacrificed to the time-travel scenes. And it is the time-traveling literary aspect of the book that piqued my curiosity in the first place and which so excited me as a reading prospect--I would have hated to have had someone tell Bosworth early on to simply drop them and write your everyday coming-of-age text. Instead, I think she needed someone to say--"great idea, but can you keep working on it?" Maybe it was just too ambitous a project for a debut novel. I'd love to see it again ten years from now after she writes another novel or three and then takes this one out of the drawer again. But in this version, I can't recommend it.
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