In the 21st-century Kingdom of Versailles, the roads are terrible and Paris is a dirty little town. Serfdom and slavery are both common, and no one thinks that's wrong. Why should they? Most people spend their lives doing backbreaking farm work anyway.But teenaged Khadija, daughter of a prosperous family of Moorish business travellers, is unfazed. That's because Khadija is really Annette Klein from 21st-century California, and her whole family are secret agents of Crosstime Traffic, trading for commodities to send back to our own timeline. Now it's time for Annette and her family to go home for the start of another school year, so they join a pack train bound for their home base in Marseilles, where the crosstime portal is hidden.Then bandits attack while they're crossing the Pyrenees. Annette/Khadija is separated from her parents and knocked out, and wakes up to find herself a captive in a caravan of slaves being taken to the markets in the south. She's in a tight spot. Then the really scary thing her purchasers take her, along with other newly purchased slaves, to an unofficial crosstime portal…leaving open the question of whether Crosstime Traffic will ever be able to recover her! Harry Turtledove's In High Places is the third book in this parallel adventure series.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Dr Harry Norman Turtledove is an American novelist, who has produced a sizeable number of works in several genres including alternate history, historical fiction, fantasy and science fiction.
Harry Turtledove attended UCLA, where he received a Ph.D. in Byzantine history in 1977.
Turtledove has been dubbed "The Master of Alternate History". Within this genre he is known both for creating original scenarios: such as survival of the Byzantine Empire; an alien invasion in the middle of the World War II; and for giving a fresh and original treatment to themes previously dealt with by other authors, such as the victory of the South in the American Civil War; and of Nazi Germany in the Second World War.
His novels have been credited with bringing alternate history into the mainstream. His style of alternate history has a strong military theme.
Nice little story, reminiscent of Andre Norton for a smartly assembled, YA-oriented novel.
Khadija is, or perhaps was, an oil merchant's daughter from the Muslim kingdoms of southern Spain. Now she is a slave, stolen weeks ago from her father's caravan between the Kingdom of Versailles and home, auctioned in Madrid, then taken to a mysterious room that made Madrid disappear from around her, replaced by a rural villa in an unknown country.
Jacques the tailor's son was a young foot-soldier and messenger for the Duke of Versailles, assigned to the caravan -- and to spy on the oil merchant and his family. Jacques has been taken as well. Although he wants to return to his family, slavery is all too common in his culture, and he knows escape is unlikely and ransom impossible.
But Khadija is not so accepting of her fate, because her family is not truly what it seems. Not even of Jacques world, her family are traders for Crosstime Traffic, an import/export company from our 'home-timeline', bringing much-needed resources from alternate timelines in exchange for home-timeline commodities. Khadija is Annette Klein, on a last trade run before starting Ohio State, and she recognizes the slave-villa for what it is -- a corrupt rip-off of Crosstime Traffic equipment set up for sinister purposes, that needs to be brought down.
The story suffers from some pacing problems, going slow-fast-slow; it also needs some character development.
SRC Spring 2018 Task 20.3 by benefit of Harry Turtledove's initials, but definitely on my monopoly board and part of my attempt to clear my fallen-off-shelves shelf and wrap my 2017 (yes, seventeen) TBR challenge.
"I very much enjoyed this novel set in southern France/northern Spain in an alternate Middle Ages world where Crosstime travelers from our modern era travel covertly to other Earths to trade for resources that are running out at home. The lead characters are Annette, a 17-year-old Jewish girl who plays the role of the daughter of a Muslim merchant, and Jacques, a young man in the army of the Duke of Paris in the Kingdom of Versailles. Turtledove is a professional historian well known in scifi and fantasy for writing great alternate history novels. Although the first two books in this series have drawn poor reviews, I give this title a high rating. While the tone is primarily for a YA audience, anyone interested in history, the What-if possibilities of time travel, and the many threads in Earth's history where a twitch of the loom could have thrown world history onto a new path will like this book. It's now out in paperback, on Amazon. Tom.
Best so far of the cross-time series. An easy read, probably is understated on the interpretation of slavery (e.g. prospective young reader, try reading Alex Halley's ROOTS, or Octavia Butler's Kindred). But Turtledove has dealt nicely with several themes in history, e.g. the eventual removal of slavery from both an ethics and economic perspective and concurrently the ongoing pervasiveness of slavery in modern culture (Hint, Mr Turtledove, you might consider a brief afterword essay for this novel, where you highlight the extent formalized slavery exists today, not tied to any formal national economy but still pervasive in a unofficial market).
Liked the way the protagonist, a teenager, was able to agilely think her way out of the trouble she was in (no spoilers).
It's a good series, light entertaining for adults and I hope teens are reading it as well.
Aside from being just plain dumb and loaded with inconsistencies the chief problem was that the story was over-the-top preachy. Entirely too much pretentious high-mindedness. Crosstime Traffic are heroic & legitimate interlopers and exploiters but those bad-apple users of the pirated Transposition Chamber are e-v-i-l. Really? Come on Harry, you can do better than this. At least you USED to be able to write better...
Okay, I get it Harry, 'slavery' is a bad thing even when African Moors are practicing it against 'white' European Neo-Christians in a cliche 'Alt-Time' role-reversal. And it is even more heinous when Home-Timeline types who ought to know better exploit alt-time primitives for personal gratification. Blah blah blah, yada yada yada...
Crosstime Traffic is a well developed series of YA novels about alternate realities of earth that can be visited using technology. There is a home timeline from which merchants trade for goods and materials—taking advantage of alternates where raw materials had not yet been depleted. In each alternate there has been a historical divergence.
This is one of the best novels in the series where the crosstime technology is being misused. It is largely an adventure tale, but it interweaves concepts of humanity, ethics, and historical interpretation.
I got this book on impulse after having finished "Guns of the South", not realizing it was intended for a Young Adult audience. I am an elderly adult, so this book wasn't really for me.
The concept was interesting, but it played out a little too simply. A great deal of the book seemed to be intended to be a moral lesson, which I found to be preachy much of the time.
I did read books like this when I was a young adult, or more likely, a teenager, and I think that I would have found this interesting back then, in the 60s. Today, not for me. For others, I am sure it would be a good book to read, and probably a book good to read as well.
Turtledove needs an editor who can stand up to him. Repetitive. Sentences of all the same length. “Boots thudded” three times in two pages. Some poorly structured sentences that required multiple readings to comprehend mixed in with fairly banal and uninspired prose. Story is fine. Overly simple and fairly whitewashed depiction of slavery. I still don’t understand what the title has to do with anything.
Harry, if you are going to write a book for anyone over age 9 about a pretty 17 year-old girl who is caught by marauders and sold into slavery, you've got to be realistic. Even kids are not stupid. They know what happens to pretty girl slaves. So if you want to write a clean book for kids of any age pick another topic. (Like what you did in your other books in this young adult series.)
In High Places, the third in Turtledove's YA Crosstime Traffic series, begins with an unexpected conceit: in a parallel universe where 4/5ths of Europe is killed by the Black Plague (rather than 1/3rd), coincidental timing led a French preacher to become an enduring prophet, Henri, known to Christians as the Second Son. Hundreds of years later, Henri is worshipped by many Christians alongside God and Jesus, and society has hardly crawled past the Dark Ages. The wealthy Muslims of North Africa and the Middle East largely ignore the small, harmless kingdoms of Europe, other than merchants looking to trade.
This is where Crosstime Traffic enters the picture. They've sent a Jewish family to pose as Arab traders in Versailles. A powerful duke who finds the "Arabs" odd enlists the help of Jacques, a teenage laborer who speaks Arabic, to spy on the family as they travel in a caravan to Marseilles. Before any spy intrigue can take place, the caravan is raided, Annette Klein and Jacques are sold into slavery, and from that point on, the story goes bananas, taking a number of unexpected turns that make it a lot of fun to read.
"Fun" is good, because Turtledove's main focus here is the horror of life as a slave. He contrasts different social strata (Annette, a girl from the "home timeline" disgusted by slavery; Jacques, a free peasant frustrated by his own slavery while seeing slavery itself as a simple fact of life; and several minor characters who have always been slaves) and delves into the historical pros and cons of a deplorable institution. The novel's endless invention keeps it from getting too depressing.
I would have liked to see a bit more emphasis on religion in the book. Turtledove takes care to note the similarities and differences, positives and negatives, of the three Abrahamic religions, but once this mixed bag of religions end up as slaves, it might have been nice to emphasize how little religious differences matter one one large group is oppressed and brutalized by one very small group. I would have also liked to see more depth to the idea of a major religion emerging in one alternate that isn't present in other worlds.
I wouldn't call that a shortcoming, though. I'm interested in the crazy religious aspects; Turtledove just wants to tell a story about slavery. The story he chose to tell, I really liked.
Each volume of the Crosstime Traffic series gets a little better in terms of bringing characters and alternate timelines to life. As with the first book in the series, this one tends to over-explain comparisons between timelines, which seems to be a short-coming that is more blatantly obvious when the alternate timeline diverges more from the series' "home timeline".
Like the second book, Curious Notions, this one has stronger characters from the "alternate timeline(s)", which seems to help bring the setting to life in a way that explanations and comparisons never can. Like the first book, this one dwells on tedious details at the expense of story, though it does so to a far lesser extent.
The main reason I hesitate to give this book 3 stars is that it (and to a lesser extent the series up to this point) is really missing its audience almost entirely because of the apparent assumptions in the writing style. The writing might be fine for an intelligent 8-10 year old, but the themes and settings tend to lean towards an older age group. Good YA authors give their readers more credit when it comes to what needs an explanation, but they also take more care with sensitive subjects. Slavery and religion feature as central themes in this book (and featured to a lesser extent in the first), but they are treated with nearly as heavy a hand as subjects that are less sensitive today, such as smoking, or killing animals for fur, are handled in all of the books in this series.
Additionally, though less in this book than the previous two, the teenaged characters are sometimes written as children, even (or especially) when they are put into situations in which they behave primarily as adults. If the intended audience is teenagers, this would likely be at least off-putting, if not insulting.
I previewed this book for my school's library. In general, I liked the alternate history concept and the notion of travel to other alternate versions of our world as a form of commerce, as the main character does. I enjoyed the way these alternates FEEL like different times, but really aren't. A Paris alternate that still feels Medieval is not that way because you have jumped in time, but because in that alternate, the Black Plague was more widespread, the Crusades were not as successful for the Europeans and more so for the Muslims marching north, various key people who advanced society in important ways – the printing press, microbiology and medicine, weaponry, etc. – did not exist, etc.
The book is a good yarn for middle and high school students. It isn't great writing, and so it receives three stars from me. The writing felt a bit clunky to me, and felt as if it had been written over a period of time without a lot of revision, so that things felt repetitive and a bit tedious sometimes. For example, because people were speaking in many languages, with some bits and pieces being picked up by some characters, while others from the "home" alternate had implant chips to upload languages to them, there were many languages being spoken throughout the book. The author draws our attention to these constantly shifting languages too much, and so the mechanics of the set-up and his insistence on explaining each and ever variation became wearisome.
Other than that, I would still recommend the series to fans of sci-fi and alternate history, especially MS and HS students.
“In High Places” is a novel of Crosstime Traffic by Harry Turtledove. While this author writes fantasy I know him mainly from his alternate history novels. His educational background includes a PhD in Byzantine history.
He has 6 novels in his young adult Crosstime Traffic series and this one is the 3rd. Each novel is a standalone but set in the same universe where the people of a future earth have discovered how to travel to alternate worlds where history unfolded differently than our time line. But each novel focuses around different characters, but in all the main protagonists are teenagers.
The novels are a light and enjoyable read; the exact type of books that pulled me into science fiction when I was a pre-teen. In reading them as an adult, I have to judge them differently. I like the ideas he brings forward enough but I must temper my desire for adult ideas and characters and just enjoy the trouble the teen characters have found themselves in.
With the popularity of teen-focused novels (Harry Potter, Hunger Games, …) I can’t help but compare this series with them as to what is possible. I feel that the full potential is not being reached by Mr Turtledove. I do feel that this 3rd novel is the best of the 3 I’ve read so far, but I do wish for more.
But if you have a pre-teen or wish to relive the days when you were nibbling at the science fiction buffet table wondering if it was worth to plunge in, this is not a bad place to start.
This is the third book in Turtledove's "Crosstime Traffic" series, which I think is aimed at a younger audience. I thought the first two books were okay, but not up to his other alternate history tales, mainly because the plots weren't all that complex.
In this book, though, Turtledove adds a little bit of flavor that made it more interesting. In this one, a family are working for Crosstime Traffic in an alternate late twenty-first century France where the country is just starting to recover from a great plague and consequently looks more like fifteenth- or sixteenth-century in terms of technology, political structure (there is no France, per se, just a bunch of kingdoms like the Kingdom of Paris, the Kingdom of Versailles, etc.), and basically the southern half of the country is controlled by Muslims. The family is part of a caravan that is attacked by slavers, and the daughter gets separated from the parents and sold into slavery in Madrid.
But there are other twists which I won't detail.
If you were going to start reading this series, I would tell you to ignore the first two, except that they really lay the groundwork for the concept of the series. I would instead say read the first two, knowing they're merely okay, but with book three, things get better (and hopefully continue so).
In the 3rd Crosstime Traffic book, Harry Turtledove starts playing with the conventions of the series that were established in the first two books. This time around, Annette is in an early gunpowder technology world where the Black Death killed 90% of the population of Europe instead of 1/3. On her trip home, she's ambushed by bandits and sold into slavery.
So far, the plot follows the formula of having to deal with trouble with the dangerous natives of the alternate world, while keeping the secret of travelling between worlds. This time around, though, Turtledove turns things on their heads and Annette needs to deal with dangers far worse than the troublesome natives. In addition, while still part of a young adult series, some of the subject matter dealt with is very mature content, and packs more emotional depth than the first two books in the series. After seeing Turtledove yank the rug out from under me this time around in the series, I can't wait to read the remainder...
The Crosstime Traffic series is one that isn't very coherent. Not all of the books are excellent in terms of their plots and the only common thread is the background, not what's going on in each novel. I've been reading my way through, partly out of order and I'm finding that I can't predict what I will or won't like.
This is certainly one of the better Crosstime Traffic books that I've read.
This was my first introduction to Harry Turtledove. Coming in on the middle of the Crosstime Traffic series (this was book 3) didn't seem to hurt me much at all. The writing itself was nothing spectacular (it was so easy I finished it in one day), but the research and thought put into his alternate world (the deviation point was a more deadly European Black Plague that Islam as the major religion) was thought-provoking. I would gladly read another of Turtledove's books any day.
Best of the Crosstime novels so far - the characters are stronger, the plot is interesting & unpredictable, and there are some very interesting philosophical/spiritual questions raised. (I don't agree with all his conclusions, but I'm glad someone is using "young adult fiction" to bring up important issues.)
A surprisingly good read! The plot is actually credible and the main characters are interesting and easy to sympathoze with. This is my first alternate history novel, though, so I'm not that familiar with the genre.
I find the Crosstime Traffic series always amusing, not really outstanding, but good fun to read. All novels are standalone episodes, although in some cases I detect a bit of repetitiveness. In High Places stands out in the sense that is has more excitement and a little suspense as well.
Great concept and had I been in the 5th grade I no-doubt would have loved this book. It's not advanced enough to be considered Young Adult. It's somewhere between Dr. Suess and YA.
Very good book. I liked the idea that people took advantage of other alternates and it was interesting to see a little more of Crosstime Traffics besides just what the characters mention about them
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.