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Geeks and the Holy Grail (Camelot Code #2), by Mari Mancusi, for Timeslip Tuesday

The first book in the Camelot Code series, The Once and Future Geek , mixed time travel between the medieval world of King Arthur and our own, and it is a very entertaining book.  The second book in the series, Geeks and Holy Grail (Hyperion, October 2019), is also entertaining (though not quite as funny; King Arthur as a modern day high school student is hard to beat....). When Morgana, sworn enemy of King Arthur, attacks the druids of Avalon, Nimue, the youngest of them, takes the Holy Grail and runs with it.  King Arthur is dying, and only the Grail can save him.  Desperate to keep it from falling into Morgana's hands, she stumbles into Merlin's Crystal Cave.  But instead of Merlin there to help her (he's on vacation in Los Vegas, in our time), there's only his very inexperienced apprentice, Emrys.  His attempt to hide the grail works, in a sense--as a small, flatulent dragon, it sure doesn't look much like a grail.  But it isn't much use to Arthur as a...
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The Secret

The Secret

The Edge of Forever, by Melissa E. Hurst

The Edge of Forever, by Melissa E. Hurst (Sky Pony, 2015), is a YA time-travel mystery, with a nascent romance, lots of secrets, nefarious goings on, and murder.  

In the future it's been discovered that some people possess a gene that allows them to time travel, and these people have been taken under the control of the government and trained as historical observers.  In 2146, 17-year-old Bridger is one of these being trained.  On a routine  school-time travel training trip, things go wrong-- he gets distracted by seeing his dead father in the crowd, and partly because of that, his partner is killed.  Now Bridger's determined to find out what his dad was doing at that time and place, and he finds that his father was trying to break the most fundamental rule of time travel.  He was trying to prevent the murder of a 16 year old American girl, Alora.

Back in 2013, Alora has started having blackouts, each time waking up in a different place.  That's not the only thing on her mind--her Aunt Grace is struggling to keep their property, and she has a mystery of her own--what happened to her parents?  A darker mystery is about to shake her community, when one of her classmates is murdered.  And who is the mysterious boy who's shown up unannounced?

It is, of course, Bridger, there illegally to save her from the fire that will claim her life, and maybe save his father in the process.  But he's three months too soon.  And so the two teens have plenty of time to tackle all the mysteries, before being hit at the end with the biggest and most dangerous surprise of all....

This is the sort of book that reminds me why "government/corporate controlled time travel in the future" is generally my least favorite time travel sub-genre.  It's often too confusing (in this case I was confused by aspects of the future world, and all the various jumpings around through time, but this could just be me) and often it's not as magically and emotionally compelling as happenstance time travel.  The fact that half the book is from Alora's realistic quotidian point of view (high school, family uncertainty, asshole boy, classmate murdered....), and that for most of Bridger's point of view he's also reacting to our present day world, with very little culture shock, did not make it more interesting for me.   

One the other hand, the mysteries were engaging, and the last third was gripping (all the answers come Bang at you at the end).   So if you think high school drama, murder, and sci-fi sound like fun, you might well enjoy it.


This stands alone just fine, but there is a sequel--On Through the Never, and though I didn't love this one, I might give it a try.....

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Dead Voices, by Katherine Arden

Dead Voices , by Katherine Arden (middle grade, G.P. Putnam's Sons, August 2019), is a delightfully spooky sequel to Small Spaces , perfect for a chilling read as winter draws closer! Ollie, Coco, and Brian became close friends under somewhat trying circumstances last fall--the evil Smiling Man trying to turn them into scarecrows--and now winter has come, they're on their way to a fun weekend at a new ski lodge with Ollie's dad and Coco's mom.  They almost don't make it through the intense snowstorm, and when they arrive, they find themselves the only visitors.  The snow keeps falling, trapping them inside, and the power goes out.  And there are ghosts. The day after they arrive another visiter makes it through the snow, a young reporter for a ghost hunting magazine.  The owners of the hotel aren't sure that publicity about the hotel's previous incarnation of an orphanage with a dark, sad, history is what they want, but the young man is keen to get ghost hun...
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Premeditated

I'm going to start with the blurb from the back cover of this book, because it does a remarkable job of introducing the story in very few words: A week ago, Dinah’s cousin Claire cut her wrists. Five days ago, Dinah found Claire’s diary and discovered why. Three days ago, Dinah stopped crying and came up with a plan. Two days ago, she ditched her piercings and bleached the black dye from her hair. Yesterday, knee socks and uniform plaid became a predator’s camouflage. Today, she’ll find the boy who broke Claire. By tomorrow, he’ll wish he were dead. Claire and Dinah are cousins who are incredibly close, close enough that when Claire ends up in a coma in the hospital from a failed suicide attempt, Dinah knows where to look to find Claire's diary (or the computerized version of one, anyway). Dinah figures out what drove Claire to the point of suicide--a boy from the private school that Claire was supposed to attend that fall. Dinah enrolls at the school herself, determined to get...
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The Hippo at the End of the Hall, by Helen Cooper

If you are a fantasy fan who loves quirky small museums with collections of oddities, you will love  The Hippo at the End of the Hall , by Helen Cooper (first published in the UK in 2017, now out in the US from Candlewick, Oct 2019). Ben's invitation to the Gee Museum was delivered by bees.  He'd never heard of the place before, but despite his mother's reservations about letting him go there on his own (reservations which seem, for reasons, to be a bit much, even taking into account the fact that Ben's only ten)  he went...There, in its rooms full of taxidermidied creatures, other natural history collections, a glass bee hive, and clocks and other treasures collected by the Gee family from around the world years ago, he found magic, and the truth about his father, who died many years ago while off on an expedition of his own. Ben also found danger, one of my personal least favorite types of danger--the unscrupulous developer, in this case paired with the unscrupulous d...
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