April 2017 - A Traveller in Time

[Manybooks, Active moderator]

For April, we will be reading Alison Uttley's A Traveller In Time. For me, this will be a reread, as I read the novel in high school and massively loved it (the time travelling aspects, the historical setting and also how the author so authentically manages to depict both the present of Penelope's aunt and uncle's farm and the past, how the farm appeared during Tudor times). Happy reading, and like always, I have no issues with spoilers (but if you do want to use spoiler tags, go right ahead).

[Manybooks, Active moderator]

Hope to start with the novel tonight or tomorrow. What I most and most pleasantly remember from my previous read as a teenager is that Alison Uttley paints realistic pictures of both the present and the past, and the time travelling aspect is actually somewhat of a family "secret" (with some members able to and others unable to).

[Karen, Active moderator]

Just finished this book yesterday and absolutely loved it! I don't know how I ever missed this book while I was growing up or while teaching.

[Manybooks, Active moderator]

As a young teenager, I both dreamed of and desperately wanted to open a door and be magically transported into the past and thus Allison Uttley's A Traveller in Time (where young Penelope Taberner does precisely that) was right up my proverbial alley so to speak (especially since she is transported into the past of the United Kingdom). However, as Penelope is caught up in the life and times of a rural Tudor manor house and the Babingtons' striving to save Mary Queen of Scots, both her and also the reader's infatuation with especially young and dashing Francis Babington is clouded by the knowledge of the future (of British history), that the family's plot to free Mary Queen of Scots from imprisonment is doomed to epically fail. Although readers not all that versed in Tudor history (and especially the religious conflicts of the time between Church of England Queen Elizabeth I and her Roman Catholic cousin Mary Queen of Scots) might find A Traveller in Time potentially a trifle difficult and challenging, the novel is indeed (and in my humble opinion) a simply and utterly wonderful, enlightening sojourn and romp, not only into the past to which Penelope travels, but also into early to middle 20th century rural Derbyshire from where or perhaps more to the point from whence Penelope opens her aunt's farmhouse doors into the past, into Tudor era Derbyshire. And while the pace of A Traveller in Time is indeed rather slow and descriptive, this is to and for me precisely what has always made this novel such a constant and perennial favourite (although if a potential reader really does need and require constant action and adventure, then A Traveller in Time would likely not be that good a choice).

[Manybooks, Active moderator]

Karen wrote: "Just finished this book yesterday and absolutely loved it! I don't know how I ever missed this book while I was growing up or while teaching."

I was lucky enough to have read this as a teenager (my sister had a copy but I absconded with it).