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An entrancing adventure for today's troubled planet, The Casket of Time is a fantastical tale of time travel and environmental calamity from celebrated Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason. Teenage Sigrun is sick of all the apocalyptic news about the "situation" and, worse, her parents' obsession with it. Sigrun's family--along with everyone else--decides to hibernate in their TimeBoxes®, hoping for someone else to fix the world's problems . But when Sigrun's TimeBox® opens too early, she discovers an abandoned city overrun by wilderness and joins a band of kids who are helping a researcher named Grace solve the "situation." The world, according to Grace, is under an ancient curse. There once was a princess named Obsidiana, who was trapped in time by the greedy king of Pangea. To protect Obsidiana from dark and gloomy days, the king put her in a crystal casket made of spider silk woven so tightly that time itself couldn't penetrate. The king's greed for power doomed his kingdom and the trapped princess. Sigrun sees eerie parallels between the tale of Obsidiana and the present-day crisis, and realizes it's up to her and her friends to break the ancient curse and fix the world.… (more)
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Originally published in Icelandic as Tímakistan, this novel was one I started, enjoyed, and then put away for a time, before picking it back up again. As other reviewers have noted, the disconnect between the two story-lines is one that can feel off-putting to the reader, even though the inset story of Obsidiana (which takes up around 90% of the book) is central to understanding what is happening in Sigrun's world. For me, the two story-lines felt so different that it took me a while to adjust, when switching from one to another, especially when the inset tale ended up being so much longer than the framing one. The contemporary scenes had a quirky sense of humor, and some pointed social commentary that was quite interesting, while those set in Pangea had a classic fairy-tale feeling. One felt like science fiction, while the other felt like fantasy. I thought the idea of using Pangaea - a super-continent that began to break apart approximately 175 million years ago, leading to Earth's current seven continents - to retell the Snow White story was brilliant (if scientifically unsound), and overall I enjoyed the inset story more than the contemporary one. Perhaps this is partly owing to the feeling that the contemporary story-line wasn't developed fully enough? There are some interesting ideas here, as Magnuson plays around with the notion of time, and the human relationship to it, making this a children's book with some philosophical depth.
Although not perfect - the two parts here just don't quite fit together, despite being related, perhaps because of the different feelings they evoke - The Casket of Time was certainly entertaining, and quite thought-provoking. I would definitely pick up more of Andri Snær Magnason's work - perhaps his other children's book - The Story of the Blue Planet?