Tanglewreck (Bloomsbury Educational Editions) - Hardcover

Jeanette Winterson is a novelist whose honours include the Whitbread award and the American Academy's E.M. Forster Award. With her debut in the early eighties, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, she soon won the praise of such masters as Gore Vidal ("the most interesting young writer I've read in twenty years"). Her first children's book was a picture book, The King of Capri. Tanglewreck is her first novel for younger readers.

Grade 6-10–A Time Tornado drops ancient horsemen and chariots into present-day London and causes a busload of school children to disappear into thin air. A mysterious, self-proclaimed scientist known as Regalia Mason secretly seeks to profit from this event and other disturbances so that she can harvest spare time and sell it through her company. Meanwhile, a sinister alchemist named Abel Darkwater seeks a clock known as the Timekeeper in order to become even more powerful than Mason. At the center of this struggle is an orphan named Silver and her 500-year-old house, Tanglewreck, where she lives with her aunt as the prophesied Keeper of the Clock. She embarks on a prophecy-fulfilling interstellar journey to locate the Timekeeper and guarantee the safety of time as we know it. Winterson masterfully weaves together an imaginative array of settings and characters to bring the story to its exhilarating fulfillment. Silver's varied relationships add even more depth, encapsulating family, friendship, deceit, and abuse. Some explanations of futuristic technology, concepts of time and space, and even humor will likely be too challenging for most children younger than the book's 11-year-old protagonist, but this time-bending sci-fi adventure will be a fine addition to young adult collections.–Emily Rodriguez, Alachua County Library District, Gainesville, FL
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