Jane Louise Curry

Excellent story! Curry is one of the authors I keep forgetting about, and then rediscovering with yet another great book. Roger is great - the child forced to be the responsible one, and not allowing himself to trust that maybe they've got a family (his father recently married, a woman with a daughter) that will last. He's putting his hopes on a house his father just inherited...which turns out to be something rather amazing, under a _lot_ of crud, and with...complications. Shakesperean show more ghosts - with echoes in current time, Roger's father is also an actor and currently doing Hamlet. A complicated mystery that gets solved in dreams that aren't dreams... Very solid and complicated characters, in both times, and a lovely (and perfectly reasonable) assortment of bits of evidence of what happened back then. I found it particularly delightful because I lived in the area for a while, and a lot of the territory they cover (frequently on foot) is at least vaguely familiar to me. The unspooling at the end is a lovely way of fixing things. A great book, and now I want to read more of hers. show less

Tee Woodie's uncle leaves her an ushabti doll, created as a servant to ease the afterlife tasks of an Egyptian princess. Her little brother's research into hieroglyphic writings leads him to accidentally pronounce the spell to activate the ushabti. Tee is going through a rough patch at school and is only too happy to send the ushabti to do ALL her tasks while she reads escapist series fiction and eats snacks. What could possibly go wrong with this excellent scheme?

The notion of a magical servant is neat, though given that Charles stuck "something" into the spell a couple times it's weird that it worked. The consequences...I had a hard time with this book - Tee is so _dumb_. Or I suppose, more accurately, childish - she doesn't think things through. The fact that she's a lot like me at that age (book-mad, school and making-friends averse...) only made it worse. She's extremely lucky that she finally woke up and told the right person (who actually knew show more an answer, or at least where to find it) _just_ before it was too late. Good ending...though I wonder if Tee is going to be able to keep up the shabti's behavior (social and scholarly) in school. Adventure is something bad happening, to someone else, or long ago, or far away...maybe she'll be less interested in adventure books having had her own. show less

James is in London on tour with his musician parents when he discovers a window between current-day London and the London of Queen Elizabeth I. Because time passes differently on both sides of the portal, James finds himself forced to remain in the past - and while he is there come to grips with his musical talent and with his own identity.

The main theme in this work is ambivalence related to identity. James is the biracial son of musician parents, and he feels like there is no culture to show more which he truly belongs. Relatives on both sides try to include him, but he simply cannot identify with one group to the exclusion of the other. On top of that trouble, 12 year old James is barely eking by in his music classes - not for lack of talent or due to parental prodding, but due to an attempt to distance himself from the identities of his parents to discover himself.

This musical side of him becomes the focus in the journey to Elizabethan England where he is taken as a choir boy for the Chapel Royal, and begins to rediscover his love of music - and the will to work hard to perfect it. And in the end, James will have to decide between two time periods and forge his new identity.

The time travel portion of the book is a large weakness in the plot. There is not a lot of description of life in Elizabethan England; James experiences little in the way of difficulties and differences in routine. Indeed he seems to adapt almost immediately, but without belonging or really trying to belong to his new school.

The most disappointing aspect of the novel, however, is that there is no sense of how James will use his new skills and sense of identity in the life that he chooses. I did not feel that he had grown more comfortable in his skin or that he was going to make any changes at all - and in a novel that uses Elizabethan times as a trope to illustrate a sense of bifurcation and ambivalence rather than to demonstrate historical events or life, the lack of conclusion to the theme is doubly disappointing. show less