![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Except for a pat and unnecessary twist at the end, when Josh's father shows up just in time for Peck to hint at a marital reconciliation, this clever caper doesn't miss a beat. In 1937, during the Depression, fifteen-year-old Mary Alice, initially apprehensive about leaving Chicago to spend a year with her fearsome, larger-than-life grandmother in rural Illinois, gradually begins to better understand and admire her grandmother's unusual qualities. The author takes equal care in creating his characters, which include a string of silly English au pairs hired by Josh's newly single mom Josh's 12-year-old sister (``I'm virtually thirteen and emotionally fourteen'') trendy teachers (the reading teacher calls his course Linear Decoding). To Peck's (The Last Safe Place on Earth) credit, the time travel mechanisms seem almost plausible even better, they don't overpower the story. Before long Aaron has imported a few characters from 1923 into the present, where Josh must cope with them. Sixth-grader Josh, from an upscale Manhattan home, gets mixed up in his best friend Aaron's experiments with ``cellular reorganization'' (Aaron compares the process to faxing himself through cyberspace Josh calls it time-travel). Amiable characters, fleet pacing and witty, in-the-know narration will keep even the non-bookish interested in this semi-fantastic adventure. ![]()
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