This Book Is A "Stately Pleasure-Dome"

Any book that's favorably blurbed by Charles de Lint is going to get my attention. Turns out Charles knew what he was doing. This book is "fabulous" in all of the deeper and richer meanings of that word.

We start out a bit slowly. Our heroine, Freddy, is sort of a sad sack and aggressively unhappy with just about everything. Oh no, you think, how much of this whinging, angry, angsty teen can I take. But, even at the outset, there's a hint that Freddy is being overwritten, that she's being hyper unhappy for a reason that will be made clear. And that's exactly where we go. When all of the other characters are attention demanding, over the top, elemental forces, well you don't want your heroine being lost in the shuffle.

And this book is over the top, but in all of the best ways. It takes some of its inspiration from Coleridge's Romantic masterpiece, "Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream", but then runs all over the world of mythology - places, timelines, characters, themes - to create a pleasure dome that could be the hip/ambitious YA novel version of an opium dream.

This book has sometimes been described as a time travel adventure, and I guess it is that if that's all you want to see. There is time travel and there is adventure. But it's a lot more of a literary psychedelic head trip than that, and I mean that in a good way. It's sort of magical realism teen angst crossed with post-postmodern storytelling and an anything goes sensibility that somehow merges sibling rivalry with tentacles and makes it work.

This is fun, heady stuff. And, even if you lose the thread here or there, or wonder how exactly Tab A fits into Slot B, it doesn't matter. There are a half dozen great characters and so much smart, witty, sly dialogue and throwaway bits of business that any reader with a taste for roller coaster tale-telling will just enjoy the ride. This is energetic and brimming with ideas; it careens all over before dropping you off safe and sound back where you started, and it is a total hoot. Just a fabulous find.

(Please note that I received a free advance ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

An engaging, fresh YA story. Two eccentric and mysterious characters move in next door, and before she knows what's going on, Freddy finds herself hopping all over time and repeatedly encountering two immortals (one of whom is always 14) and a repeatedly reincarnated third, who she suspects is not exactly what the two immortals claim.

Along the way, she figures out some family dynamics, and matures.

In the pre-release version I got from Netgalley, I didn't see any typos or recurrent errors, except that the author frequently uses "may" instead of "might" in past tense narration (compare "can" and "could").

The characters were interesting and had dimension and heft, the set-pieces were fun (and often funny), and the mystery plot progressed at a steady pace.

Recommended.

Writing: 4; Characters: 4; Plot: 4

I love YA books and this one was a lot of fun. Best for the 12 – 14 year old crowd.

14 year old Freddie knows she is “doomed to be sensitive forever”. She lives with her younger sister Mel and her step-brother Roland, a tall, hulking, deaf teenager who seems to bring both order and chaos to everything he touches. Freddie works hard to stay as invisible as possible. Enter the weird new neighbors who take the lonely house on Grosvenor Street. Cuerva LaChance is a Mrs. Whatsit like creature who is almost always cheerful and has a capital case of super ADD; Josiah is a humorless, bored 14 year old who picks fights by simply existing. Freddie is horrified to find him in most of her classes.

The book starts slowly, appearing to be a typical coming-of-age story, but around 30% of the way in it takes off stratospherically, or rather time-ospherically, as time travel suddenly reaches in and literally yanks Freddie and Josiah off on a pinball machine like journey covering 9th century Sweden, prehistoric China, 17th century France, and 92nd century (yes, 92nd!) England. Characters from Norse, Polynesian, and Chinese mythology are woven in and as a bonus, we learn the identity of the “person from Porlock” – historically blamed for interrupting Coleridge as he scribbled the poem Kubla Khan. While Josiah is blasé about the adventure, having literally lived though it before, Freddie is given every possibility to learn and grow up and help unravel a world altering mystery facing them in the current time. What or Who exactly is Three? And why is their “Choice” so important?

FYI, as a veteran SF reader, I was impressed with her handling of the time travel – both philosophically and mechanically. I was also very impressed with the literary and mythological references. It’s not often you find a book that can move through such different areas so smoothly.

This will be high on my new recommendation list! Original, thought provoking, funny and touching, and extremely entertaining. I guarantee young readers will be enagaged and pleasantly surprised by the twists and turns of this story.