Jessamy

I found this a pleasant timeslip fantasy, but perhaps I'm spoiled by over-familiarity with the genre. I liked that Jessamy is a servant's child rather than a daughter/cousin of the house, that the villains aren't terribly villainous, and that there's friendship rather than a budding love between Jessamy and Kitto.
But compared with Tom's Midnight Garden, for instance, it felt rather slight and restrained. On the whole I prefer Sleigh's Carbonel, where I felt there was something more at stake, and where the children have definite tasks to accomplish.

I read two interesting reviews of this book on Amazon. One was by a young mother who had enjoyed this book so much she named her daughter Jessamy, and the other by that same daughter who said her mother had died and she was doing a report for school on her name and found her mother's review accidentally when she looked it up on Google. To me that seemed very much a coincidence when reviewing a book about time travel.
Now, to the book. I like it that the mode of traveling is never really gone into. We know that 1967 Jessamy stays at a house which is empty except for a caretaker. While exploring the house Jessamy goes into the nursery and crawls inside a clothes cabinet. She sees some dates and marks for measuring height on the inside. The show more dates are the same month and day as the one she is in but from 1914. It is not the clothes cabinet so much as the confluence of the month and day....and the person of Jessamy who we find out later is related to the Jessamy from 1914. While Jessamy is in 1914 time passes and she spends a long time in the home of the Parkinsons, but time stands still for her in 1967 so she isn't missed while she is gone. Besides the time travel there is a mystery. The Grandfather Parkinson owns a valuable Book of Days which is stolen. Blame falls on his oldest grandson but Jessamy, as well as the other Parkinson grandchildren, do not believe their brother committed this crime. How this is resolved and Jessamy's part in that resolution give the book its greater meaning. I enjoyed it and recommend trying to find a copy. I got a paperback copy from England. They are not easy to come by. show less

"Jessamy mysteriously finds her own name written on the wall in a large old house, with the date 1914. Somehow Jessamy is transported back to that time and is involved in the theft of a valuable treasure - a treasure she must find...."

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