Edge of Yesterday and Da Vinci's Way by Robin Stevens Payes, 2017/2018

Edge of Yesterday:

When thirteen-year-old geek-girl Charley Morton decides to build what she believes is Leonardo da Vinci's design for a time machine for the middle school science fair, she has two thoughts in mind: to win first prize and to travel back in time to meet her idol, Leonardo. Her goal: to find out how the Renaissance artist, engineer, scientist, musician, anatomist, and inventor managed to do it all.

(123 pages)

When the author's publicist reached out to me to about reviewing these two books, I was intrigued by the description of Payes's Edge of Yesterday learning platform focused on bringing girls to STEM/STEAM. As a second-year female computer science student myself, I am always interested in developments in that area.

I'm afraid that I was pretty disappointed, though. For starters, the books were both pretty short and moved jerkily. The plot moved slowly in some ways and way too fast in others, and the main characters' personalities are pretty roughly sketched out.

My main issue with the books has less to do with the writing than it does with its central purpose: encouraging girls to enter STEM. I can tell that Payes means well, but Charley basically comes across as a slightly ditzy girl with lots of half-hearted interests and a soppy fangirl attraction to a historical figure. She doesn't invent the time machine, or even the idea for the time machine–she literally just follows clues left behind by a vision and a male time traveller from the past to figure out approximately what should happen, then hands the materials over to her genius friend Billy to actually construct it. Then she accidentally triggers it and winds up in the past.

I'm serious. In a series meant to be about female empowerment, the female main character follows the lead of one guy and literally hands over the technical part of the construction to another guy. How is that empowering? Why couldn't Charley have been the one to do the wiring and figure out how to make the time machine work? I've read fantasy novels set in entirely different worlds with girls who do more hands-on technical work, and yet this is touting itself as a platform for encouraging girls to go into STEM.

And that's not even going into the issues I had with Charley's (often idiotic) behavior in the past, and her new "friend" who happens to look and often behave exactly like a friend from her own time who's been acting catty lately. Because of course the only female friendship in the entire series has to be a negative one.

Gah. I'm just done with this. We could argue about whether "rah-rah girls in science!" books are even necessary, but if you're promising to offer an empowering story then you need to come through on that promise.

Disclaimer: I received a complimentary copy of these books in exchange for an honest review.

Cold Summer by Gwen Cole, 2017

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Today, he’s a high school dropout with no future.
Tomorrow, he’s a soldier in World War II.

Kale Jackson has spent years trying to control his time-traveling ability but hasn’t had much luck. One day he lives in 1945, fighting in the war as a sharpshooter and helplessly watching soldiers—friends—die. Then the next day, he’s back in the present, where WWII has bled into his modern life in the form of PTSD, straining his relationship with his father and the few friends he has left. Every day it becomes harder to hide his battle wounds, both physical and mental, from the past.

When the ex-girl-next-door, Harper, moves back to town, thoughts of what could be if only he had a normal life begin to haunt him. Harper reminds him of the person he was before the PTSD, which helps anchor him to the present. With practice, maybe Kale could remain in the present permanently and never step foot on a battlefield again. Maybe he can have the normal life he craves.

But then Harper finds Kale’s name in a historical article—and he’s listed as a casualty of the war. Kale knows now that he must learn to control his time-traveling ability to save himself and his chance at a life with Harper. Otherwise, he’ll be killed in a time where he doesn’t belong by a bullet that was never meant for him.

(322 pages)

Some of my favorite story tropes include childhood friends falling in love, time travel, and kids healing and growing after parental abandonment. Cold Summer has all three of those, so it seems like it should be perfect for me.

And in some way, it is. I really, really enjoyed reading it. Kale and Harper's relationship is so beautiful, built on the shared experiences of their childhoods. They trust each other completely and it's beautiful to watch. Kale's struggles with his uncontrollable time travel and the PTSD from living as a soldier during WWII are tragic, though also preventable (he's literally offered an out at one point!) and occasionally skated past (we spend a lot more time in the drama of the present than in the life-or-death horror of the past). The storylines about Harper's neglectful-to-the-point-of-abandonment mother and Kale's tense-and-angry father are very delicately and honestly done.

But at the same time, the book isn't perfect. Like I said, I liked the romance between Kale and Harper–but I also didn't like how physical things got between them. At one point, they nearly even had sex! Also, the language was less than ideal: swears are littered here and there, and the f-word is even used maybe once a chapter. It's used during times of great stress usually, sure, but that's still not great especially for younger readers. I thought Harper's abandonment issues were dealt with way too quickly at the end, and the time travel mechanism still seems kind of hazy to me. I like the "purpose" they realize Kale's experiences served, but it seems really random that he was chosen for that one thing out of everything he could have done throughout history.

All that aside, I still spent a couple of hours reading and enjoying Cold Summer. It's a good summer read, full of plot and grit while somehow managing to simultaneously be rather fluffy. If you're curious, and you don't mind the medium to high-level racy material and swearing, then you might like it. Let us know in the comments section what you think if you do decide to read it!

Disclaimer: I received a complimentary copy of this novel from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

The Root Cellar by Janet Lunn, 1996

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It looked like an ordinary root cellar. And if twelve-year-old Rose hadn't been so unhappy in her new home, where she'd been sent to live with unknown relatives, she probably would never have fled down the stairs to the root cellar in the first place. And if she hadn't, she never would have climbed up into another century, the world of the 1860s, and the chaos of Civil War.

(256 pages)

I feel like I would have liked this one a lot better if I'd read it for the first time when I was younger.

It's not so much that it's geared for younger kids (in fact, it's kind of too gruesome for little children), but that the plot feels sort of . . . wobbly. On one hand it's a really cool concept, and it imparts a lot of history without being too painful, but on the other it relies on unrealistic characters and events to carry it on its way.

Rose is the worst offender when it comes to being an unrealistic character. She is, to put it in a single word, unpredictable. And not in the cool, the-author-did-this-on-purpose sort of way. No, she just up and completely changes halfway through the book for no reason other than "she went back in time, so she suddenly went from being an inhibited, emotionally-constrained doll-like girl to a headstrong, determined firecracker with a strong mind of her own." It's not that I dislike either side of her character, but I just don't like the way she so radically changes with no real impetus.

The other main thing I found confusing about the book was that it was set in Canada . . . but was about the American Civil War. And by the end, when I'd figured everything out, it was a really cool angle - I'd never known that Canadians came to fight in the war! - but it took me way too long to figure out the basic facts: that Rose is American, and that she's living with her relatives in Canada near the American-Canadian border. For a while, I honestly thought that Rose was Canadian and her relatives were the Americans. I think part of that confusion comes from the fact that Lunn grew up in America, but moved to Canada at eighteen and lived the rest of her life there: there's no real sense of an American identity for Rose to contrast against that of her relatives from Canada, because the author was a member of both countries and didn't herself differentiate between the two. That must be it, because that's the only reason I can think of for the rather muddled distinction between the two nationalities.

I did enjoy the book, though - it was a good feel-good read (except for the gruesome battle descriptions, of course). I can't see myself going out of my way to recommend it in the future, but I'm sure there are some readers out there who would be perfect for this odd little time-travel novel. When I meet one I will happily hand over my copy of the book, and probably forget entirely about it the next day.

Redeemed by Margaret Peterson Haddix, 2015

Have you read the first seven books in the Missing series? No? Then go away! There are some really major spoilers in this review - and I mean spoilers from not only book 1, but from book 7 as well. Don't read the synopsis, don't scroll down to check out the last paragraph, don't do anything except hit the back arrow and leave this page until you're ready to get excited for the last book in the Missing series.

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Jonah’s new twin must time travel and face off against his siblings’ worst enemy in order to save the future—and his family—in the eighth and final book of the New York Times bestselling The Missing series, which Kirkus Reviews calls “plenty of fun and great for history teachers as well.”
After traveling through history multiple times and finding out his original identity, Jonah thought he’d fixed everything. But some of his actions left unexpected consequences. His parents—and many other adults—are still stuck as teenagers. And now Jonah has a new sibling, an identical twin brother named Jordan.
As odd as all this is for Jonah, it’s beyond confusing for Jordan. How does everyone in his family have memories of Jonah when he doesn’t? How can his annoying kid sister Katherine speak so expertly about time travel—and have people from the future treating her with respect? A few rash moves by Jordan send them all into the future—and into danger. What if he’s also the only one who can get them back to safety, once and for all?
(416 pages; Release date September 8, 2015)

It's over. It's actually over. No more waiting for Missing books, no more begging my parents into driving me to Barnes & Noble on release day, no more bugging my sister/roomie with chants of "Only three more days now! Three more days!" as I count down to a new book. No more adventures with Jonah and Katherine, no more huge identity reveals that I never saw coming. I still have Margaret Peterson Haddix books to look forward to, but no more Missing books. And since I've been reading the Missing series for as long as I've been reading Haddix's books, that is really, really weird to me.

But enough about me, how was the book itself? Well, I'll start with the negatives. And they all boil down to one main factor: Jordan. Not that I have anything against the poor boy (in fact, I had been biting my nails to learn more about him since he showed up at the end of Redeemed!), but he just isn't Jonah. I spent seven books getting attached to Jonah - seven books! That's a lot of pages. Those were a lot of years. The experiences I share with Jonah simply aren't there with Jordan, and so no matter how interested in his story I am I'm still more interested in Jonah's. And sadly, we don't get as much of Jonah as I would have liked. He's there, of course, and there's definitely some tension going on between him and Jordan, but he and Katherine get separated from Jordan about two-thirds of the way into the book and then that's it. No more Jonah and Katherine. Ick.

Also, I would have liked a bit more exploration of the whole twin issue. Jonah and Jordan are practically identical (because nature and nurture were both working to keep them that way), but it did slightly grate on my when people said they were practically "the same person." I mean, Margaret Peterson Haddix of all people should be able to write about genetically identical kids raised in near-identical situations - Jordan isn't just a reboot of Jonah, a "what-if" version that would have happened if Jonah had never discovered time travel. He's a real, unique, individual person. And I couldn't tell if Haddix was ignoring this, or if she simply didn't have time to deal with it when so many things were already going on in the story.

So there's the negative. What about the positive? Again, it mostly boils down to Jordan. You know, Jonah's brother, the one who got time travel (and an identical twin) dropped into his lap. How could Jordan not be awesome?! Jonah-shortage aside, there were a lot of advantages to being inside Jordan's head this time around. He acts like a time-traveling idiot for most of the book, but somehow that never really bothered me. I actually really liked the fact that he was so naive, because it's realistic. If the Jonah from Found had been dropped into Revealed, he would have been just as terrible at time traveling as Jordan is. Speaking of our dear time-traveling pro, I also dearly love the glimpses we get of Jonah throughout Redeemed, as he tries not-very-hard to hide his disgust at having an identical twin brother dropped into his life. That's probably why I got so frustrated about not being inside his head while all of that was going on.

I also loved reading about everything through a newbie's eyes. I learned the ropes of time travel alongside Jonah (actually, inside Jonah!), and I love him to pieces but it's true that my knowledge-base is exactly the same as his. With Jordan, I'm the old hat and he's the clueless newcomer to the table. Being in his head, and watching him try to get a handle on Jonah when I already know him so well, is neat. And through Jordan we get to see how much everyone respects Jonah. Very, very cool! I also love the scene about halfway through, when they go through a re-hash of some of the most dangerous moments in the past seven books. I literally squealed when Jonah said "Richard III" and I realized what was happening! Somehow it was even cooler reliving it through Jordan's eyes, because he spent the whole time freaking out about all the crazy things that happen.

Anyway, this is shaping up to be the longest review I've written in a very long time. I guess I'll stop now, but I could go on and on. I have been waiting for this book for literally five years, and I am so, so thrilled to have finally read it. A few (fairly necessary) disappointments aside, Redeemed was everything I had hoped it would be, and I absolutely loved it.

Though part of me does still wish Jonah had narrated the epilogue.

Disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.