Center for Teaching & Learning

Gwyneth is a normal teenager in a family where a select few females inherit a time travel gene. Her cousin, Charlotte, is believed to possess it, as she was born on the day Sir Isaac Newton predicted for her. She’s spent her whole life learning to fence, dance, gain proper manners, speak foreign languages, and generally, how to fit in in the past, while she misses out on sports, friends, and sleepovers. But that all goes to waste when, one day, Gwen gets dizzy, and travels into the past. She discovers she was born on the same day as Charlotte, but her mother lied about her birthday in an attempt to give Gwen a normal life. She soon finds herself transported via chronograph—a machine that sends people with the gene back to a specific year for a few hours—with Gideon (her counterpart male time traveler from the de Villiers family; the males in that family received the gene). The two of them try to collect the blood of other travelers to fill the Circle of the Twelve on the second chronograph, because the previous pair had stolen the first one.
Gideon interested me as a secondary character because, when we first meet him, he dates Charlotte, but soon after, he kisses Gwen. And not only that, but half the time he’s a complete jerk: he ignores Gwen and doesn’t help with the blindfold they make her wear on the way down to the chronograph room. But at other times he kisses her, hugs her, stands up for her and helps let her go home early. His unpredictability brought that element into the rest of the book, because readers never knew what mood he’d be in with Gwen.
A more fun secondary character was Lesley, Gwyneth’s best friend, because while Gwen wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about the gene in the family, she told what little she knew to Lesley. Every time Gwen went into the past to meet someone, she would recount every detail back to her friend, who would then spend most of the night on the Internet, to try to help answer some of the questions the men refused to answer.
I was impressed at how Gier managed to keep the time travel aspect of the novel clear and simple. I never once questioned how it worked, because I could tell she put effort into the explanation and kept the concept easy to understand. Part of what made that stick out were that there were a lot of secrets that the secret society of men kept from her, which confused me in the parts when Gwen was confused, but kept the others crystal clear.
When the novel begins, Gwen travels back uncontrolled, and doesn’t know which years she ends up in. She finds herself on a sidewalk, in her house (where its former occupants chase her around), and in a classroom where she witnesses something that confuses both her and the reader, and adds an element of mystery, which pushes the reader to keep reading, and makes the book very fast-paced.
This book is a quick masterpiece that will take you two days in which you’ll read nonstop—then you’ll wish the book were longer. This was a book I rated thirteen out of ten. Good luck putting it down.
Calla
Henry and Holt Co., 322 pages