In which I am on a bus

Happy Friday everyone!

Ok, the title is a bit of a lie, I write my posts minimum the night beforehand, and I don’t even get on the bus until 1:30 today, so: probably not on a bus. 

But I might be!  I’ll be in Duluth by 4:30 or 5 o’clock today, so depending on how far I got on my posts for the weekend, my updating may be a bit sporadic for the next couple of days.

ANYway, since it is Friday, I have another book review for you!

Clockwise by Elle Strauss

Casey is a typical 16 year old girl.  She goes to school, has family drama, crushes on boys, and randomly timejumps to 1861.

Oh, wait.

Maybe she’s not so normal. 

Anyway, on one of her uncontrollable jumps, she accidentally manages to take the object of her crush back with her, and has to deal with him, and the day to day living of a time 140 years before she was even born.

This was another interesting premise for a book.  Casey has been timejumping for seven years as the book starts, and has gotten pretty adept at living in those times.  She has a stash of clothes, and a family that she stays with every time she goes back, working as a hired hand on their farm.  The implications of the concept are fairly well thought out, and the plot twists, while not really a surprise, do hit all the right beats, and make for an entertaining story.

The biggest issue I had with this book was how the denizens of the 1860’s were written.  I understand that if a story is going to be interesting, you need to have characters that aren’t just normal people, going about their lives, but really, book?   To have every character in the 1860’s be progressive-minded, except for the main antagonist and his lackey?  You don’t need to shoehorn in every hot-button political issue of the day, especially when the period dialogue isn’t as strong as it needed to be to carry it off.

But that is really a minor qualm I had, and it didn’t detract too much from my enjoyment of the book, even if I did roll my eyes a couple of times at the “oh, look at me, I’m so smart and ahead of my time” speechifying.

All in all, this was a decent book, and I would recommend checking it out!

4/5 punctured footballs