Margaret Jean Anderson

I've managed to read Margaret Anderson's kids'/YA trilogy in reverse order but, the way the three books are structured, this is actually not a problem. Where volumes #2 and #3 tell the two sides of the same story (and I found this a fascinating exercise), In the Keep of Time involves a quite different adventure and, for the most part, quite different kids in a quite different era. Unsurprisingly, it's the least fully formed of the trio, but it's still good reading.

Andrew and Elinor and show more younger siblings Ian and Olivia (Ollie) are sent for the summer to live with elderly Aunt Grace in the Scottish borders. Aunt Grace is part-time custodian of a ruined border keep nearby, Smailholm Tower. One day the kids notice her key to the place looks different -- glowing silver rather than a matte black -- and as they turn the key to enter the keep they find themselves cast back to 1460, where James II (the real James II, not James VII & II) is repelling the sassenachs. Andrew, Elinor and Ian are unchanged by the transition but, interestingly, Ollie "becomes" the Scottish peasant girl Mae, complete with an ignorance and backstory that place her existence very firmly in this earlier time.

After adventures, the kids get back to the present day . . . but Ollie is still Mae, and much effort must be put into educating her to fit her place in the modern world. A weak point of the book is that the other three kids seem improbably unconcerned as to what might have happened to the "real" Ollie meanwhile. Eventually, though, their consciences start to twinge; and luckily the key adopts that mysterious glow once more . . .

This time, however, instead of returning them to 1460 the keep/key time device hurtles them into the future world of the other two novels. Here they help the old woman Vianah (who features in the other two books, where she recalls them fondly). This time on return to their present they discover Mae is now once more Ollie, as if the real Ollie had been there all the time within her but hiding behind a curtain, or something.

As I imply above, this is a less satisfying tale than its two successors, but it nevertheless has lots going for it. The business with Ollie/Mae was interesting and original; but even more so is a subplot in 1460 where Andrew befriends and is befriended by a youth of his own age called Cedric. Cedric is mad keen to fight at the Battle of Roxburgh alongside the men, and Andrew facilitates this -- only to witness, close up, Cedric's death on the battlefield. It's a powerful moment -- in books for the young you don't expect sympathetic characters of the readers' own age group to be butchered -- and a strong reminder that battles aren't actually romantic adventures or merely scenes of gallantry: they kill people, good and bad alike.

Between this novel and the rest of the trilogy Anderson published an unrelated time-travel story, To Nowhere and Back (1975), which I'll be reading soon. I'm looking forward to it. show less

American 10-year-old Elizabeth and her parents come to live in a small cottage in the west of England so her dad can do research in Hardy Country. Elizabeth is unsettled by it all. One day on a walk through the nearby wild woods she and her mother come across a pair of ancient derelict cottages. When Elizabeth returns there on her  own later she discovers that, far from derelict, the cottages are athrob with life; further, the forest around them is far thicker than she remembers it being show more before . . .

She eventually discovers that she has timeslipped back to 1871. There is a 10-year-old living in one of the cottages, Ann, and Ann alone of all her family knows that Elizabeth is there watching. When Elizabeth impulsively touches Ann, her identity flows into the other girl, and she is able to spend some time as a not-entirely-passive observer of Ann's life before running back through the wild woods and into the present. Needless to say, when she gets home she finds she hasn't been gone long.

Several times more Elizabeth journeys into the past to spend extended periods living within Ann's life. Finally, though, Ann's baby brother dies and Ann herself falls ill -- and, it seems certain, will soon join him. She chooses as a better option than this to come into the present and let her selfness flow into Elizabeth, the way Elizabeth's has so often flowed into her. For the rest of Elizabeth's life Ann will be, as it were, at the back of her mind.

This is an extraordinarily charming tale, and in both telling and subtlety of concept an advance on Anderson's earlier In the Keep of Time. I do hope some wise publisher somewhere has the sense soon to bring it back into print; at the moment used copies are commanding moderately high prices on Amazon. (I was able to obtain my reading copy solely through New Jersey's inter-library loan system, shortly to be axed at the behest of NJ Governor Chris Christie, who's cutting the state's library budget by a completely insane 74%.) show less

This is volume #2 in a series of three; I read #3 (The Mists of Time) a couple of weeks ago and have yet to read volume #1. Very obviously, I am Just Not Doing It Right.

To be honest, between these two books at least, it doesn't matter that I've read them in the wrong order: the two are complementary accounts of the same tale. In Mists we follow the adventures of future girl Lara Avara as her gentle people, who have relocated from Nepal (or thereabouts) to Scotland after a show more climate-change-induced collapse of civilization, deal with a local and more primitive (i.e., more 20th-century in their thinking) bunch, the Barbaric Ones. Part of the tale is bound up with the arrival from 1979 or so by time warp of the children Robert and Jennifer. Circle is the relevant part of that tale as seen not by Lara Avara but by Robert and Jennifer (mainly Robert).

"Just a rehash?" I can here you think. "What a bore!"

In fact, the effect was enchanting, as bits and pieces of the other story blossomed out, giving me a fresh insight into both stories. I'm becoming a bit of a Margaret J. Anderson fan . . . show less

I'd thought this was the first volume of a trilogy of YA time-travel novels; when it arrived, I discovered it was the third. Damn. Earlier vols are now on order from my long-suffering library . . .

After a collapse of civilization because of climate change, a gentle tribe makes their way from fiery southern zones to settle in what was once the west of Scotland. Now, in AD2179, the girl Lara Avara must establish herself in a world newly rent by an invasion of the Barbaric Ones, who carry show more much of the tribe -- Lara Avara not included -- off to slavery somewhere further south on the British mainland. The tribe has long held a nearby stone circle in reverence; and it proves that, buried underground where it looks as if there are stones missing from the ring, there are menhirs that have the special property, when handled by sensitives, of opening up time portals -- either for viewing or even for travel. Through such a portal into Lara Avara's time come a pair of 20th-century children, Jennifer and Robert, who bring their own further complications to the future world. All is eventually resolved, of course.

This is a very nicely written book, and I much enjoyed reading it. (I was puzzled, though, by how Robert's and Jennifer's speech was instantly comprehensible by the 22nd-century folk while the speech of the Barbaric Ones was just so much gibberish to them. Surely the two modern dialects would have been closer to each other than to one separated from them by a gulf of 200 years?)

No real mechanism for time travel is offered beyond that it's Yer Mystic. However, there's an interesting notion which, although eventually it's cast aside, shouldn't go unmentioned. Robert is a farmer's son, and his dad is making him follow in the family profession even though the youth really wants to be a painter, and is good at it. A solution to his dilemma is offered: one Robert could remain here in the future, complete with artistic ability and zeal; while another could exist in the 20th century stripped of all painterly yearnings. I can't remember having come across this idea before -- that time travel could be used to allow individuals to fulfil two separate life-plans, as it were. As I say, Anderson discards the concept soon enough, possibly because it'd have brought unwanted complications into her tale; the right decision, but on the other hand a pity.

I'm looking forward to reading the other titles in the series. show less