First instalment in the forthcoming YA 'Time Bomb' trilogy, this is an OK-ish genre yarn. Various young adventurers from various time-periods are dragged into our era, and thence to the English Civil War. It's a book low on original ideas, although high-enough on incident to keep itself readable. But it bogged down for me in a couple of writerly clumsinesses. There was stylistic clumsiness of the too-many-adjectives, too-many-adverbs sort:
Dora cracked open the heavy oak kitchen door, poked her head out into the stone-flagged, wooden-panelled corridor, and listened intently. [11]Three adjectives for a door is three too many; and the urge to replace simpler terms like 'opened' and 'looked out' with what one fondly imagines to be more vigorous, vivid ones like 'cracked open' and 'poked' is, broadly speaking, to be resisted I think. Then there are clumsinesses in the 'keeping the reader in necessary suspense' stakes:
Kaz turned his gaze to Steve. "And you?"This might bother me less if the clumsily deferred explanation, when it came, were a little less bleeeeuuuurgh ('They found an asteroid out in the Kuiper Belt. It was composed of a kind of substance that messes with time somehow' [237]). So that's: messes with time somehow. Okey-dokey.
"I plead the fifth," said Steve, with an apologetic shrug. "It will all become clear eventually, but for now I have to remain enigmatic. Sorry. Look there'll be time for a full explanation later but basically you two can travel in time." [63]
And that could be fixed so easily:
ReplyDelete'They found an asteroid out in the Kuiper belt. It gave off a tachyonic signature that, combined with the quantum structure of the local space-time...'
She paused at their blank looks. "It's a kind of substance that messes with time. Somehow."