Sparks of Light, by Janet B. Taylor. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017

I can’t make my mind up about this book. On one hand, some parts- like the part in the mental hospital- are very good, intense, and frightening. You can feel what kind of despair that the women in asylums back then would have felt- they may not have had evil time traveling doctors, but the treatments were just as bad. Other parts, like the amount of time spent dealing with clothing, are kind of given too much time and break the mood. Of course, the girls *are* teenagers, so being excited over clothes would be normal. But it really kills the tense mood.

I didn’t realize that this book was the second of a series when I got it, so I was a little lost about the situation. It got filled in pretty well through the book, though, so I wasn’t completely lost, but it took me a while to get my bearings.

Hope, brought up in isolation, now has a family. They are teenaged time travelers living in Scotland. Her mother has been rescued from the Middle Ages, where she was stranded, and is now suffering from PTSD. Hope has a boyfriend for the first time in her life- well, it’s the first time she has friends of any kind. She’s still getting the hang of this family and friends thing, so she has bouts of jealousy that show her immature side, but she’s doing her best.

The group’s mission is to go back to Gilded Age New York, and steal or destroy a device that, if it fell into the hands of a rival group of time travelers, could allow them to change the time line- something that Hope’s group strives to avoid. This involves the mental hospital event, a grand ball at the Vanderbilt’s, and meetings with Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, and the unhappy Consuelo Vanderbilt among others. There are lots of frantic carriage rides, intense reunions, and one extremely sad event. It’s a good book, I think, but it really needed an editor. Four stars out of five. 

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Library of Souls, by Ransom Riggs. Quirk Books, 2015

I LOVED the first two books in the Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children trilogy, so after finishing the second one I got Library of Souls from the library as soon as I could, expecting the excitement to carry on.

I was disappointed. Sorely.

I had trouble getting into the story; I actually found it a chore to read it for long stretches. It wasn’t all like that; there were some great incidents. But I felt that the book would have been twice as good if it had been half as long. There just wasn’t enough story and unique happenings to support 450 pages. The villain was a bit of a caricature; he would have fit into a comic book with his manic rule-the-world goal. There are some Deus-ex-Machina moments; some miraculous cures that, done once, were acceptable, but done more than that became just too convenient.

Unlike a fair number of reviewers, I did like the ending; I felt it was well deserved. I loved Addison the glasses-wearing, talking dog. I enjoyed the character of Sharon, the boatman on the horrible river (it wasn’t named Styx, but should have been) just because of some humor- not as laugh out loud as the heads-on-pikes on the bridge, but nice.

If you’ve read the first two books, you kind of have to read this one. I wouldn’t have been able to stand not knowing what happened. I just wish it had been better. 

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Hollow City: The Second Novel of Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children, by Ransom Riggs. Quirk Books, 2014

“Hollow City” picks up with Jacob Portman and the rest of the peculiar children where “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” left off, with the children escaping a submarine full of wights in the ocean, trying to get back to shore and to a safe place without being caught. Between German bombs and wights, their path to safety seems hopeless. Not only do they need to get to safety, they need to get help for Miss Peregrine, who is trapped in her bird form. If they do not get her transformed back to human within a couple of days, her soul will become more and more animal, and she’ll be trapped forever.

Their path takes them to a camp of Romany people, to a menagerie of peculiar animals- including a talking dog with a pipe- who aid them, a circus, St. Paul’s cathedral during a Nazi bombing raid, and into a lot of really unpleasant places. The action never stops; the children are never completely safe. This is a pretty bleak story, but the personalities of the children keep it from being a depressing read.  They are so full of life, bravery, and stoicism that you just keep rooting for them no matter how dark the story gets. And there are intervals of safety and happiness, just enough to keep the children from despair. It’s not just an adventure story; it’s a story of love, growth, and fellowship that is, I think, a stronger story than the first book. And, of course, the high point are the vintage photographs that go with the story. 

The above is an affiliate link. If you click through and buy something- anything- Amazon will give me a few cents. 

This did not influence my review.