A Handful of Time - Softcover

Kit Pearson worked as a librarian for many years before publishing her first novel, The Daring Game (1986). She went on to write the linked novels The Sky Is Falling (1989), Looking at the Moon (1991), and The Lights Go On Again (1993), published in 1999 as The Guests of War trilogy, and Awake and Dreaming (1996), which won the Governor General’s Award. Pearson lives in Victoria, close to Ross Bay Cemetery, one of the settings in Awake and Dreaming .

Grade 5-8 An important summer in the life of 12-year-old Patricia Potter involves a trip back in time for her to observe her mother, Ruth, in her mother's twelfth year. While her parents, both successful career people in Toronto, work out a separation, Patricia is sent off to her aunt's lake cottage in Alberta. Raised by fashionable and undemonstrative parents, Patricia feels out of place in the company of her rough-and-tumble cousins. Her escape comes when she discovers an old watch engraved to her grandmother, Patricia. When she winds up the watch she becomes an invisible observer to the happenings that took place in her mother's family 35 years ago. Patricia goes back and forth in time, observing her mother's unhappy childhood, and she decides to give her mother another chance, knowing what she does about the past. Although the novel is about two generations of mother-daughter relationships, all readers see of the grown-up mothers, Ruth and Nan, is from the perspective of a child. Hence, both appear as wooden and flat characters. Although the watch device is a handy one to allow the girl a glimpse of the past, there is not much explanation as to how or why the watch possesses this power. Science fiction fans may be disappointed, but the book will show adolescents how relationships in the present are often locked into patterns of the past, and that a discovery of one's family often reveals much about oneself. Yvonne A. Frey, Peoria Public Library, Ill.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.