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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 happens: her purchasers take her, along with other newly purchased slaves, to anunofficial crosstime portal...leaving open the question of whether Crosstime Traffic will ever be able to recover her! Harry Turtledove'sIn High Placesis the third book in this parallel adventure series.… (more)
User reviews
I’m not sure what Harry Turtledove is doing with In High Places, from the “Young Adult” Crosstime Traffic series. This time the teenage heroine, Annette, is in a quasi-Medieval alternate timeline where the Black Death so devastated Europe that the Muslim world was able to reconquer
The lot of female slaves is a pretty delicate subject for a “young adult” novel and Turtledove treats it with euphemisms. However, he also does something a little astonishing; one of the female slaves is also from Annette’s timeline – but she’s a volunteer “on vacation”; someone who wants to be mistreated. All I can think of is Turtledove is trying to take the theme of Fifty Shades of Grey and break it to teenagers gently. It all feels a little off. The whole Crosstime Traffic series is like this; Turtledove has plenty of chances to be didactic on important issues – how medieval life was far from romantic (Gunpowder Empire and In High Places), why socialism is a bad idea (The Gladiator), and how maybe pacifism might have drawbacks (Curious Notions) - but he always seems to draw back just before delivering the knockout punch. Perhaps he’s just preaching to the subset of readers who will pick up on the subtlety.
I’m a little mystified by Turtledove’s popularity; and that includes his popularity with me; I’ve never read a Turtledove novel I didn’t enjoy at least three stars worth. I’d never claim he’s a great writer, but he’s comfortable one; the literary equivalent of Mom’s meatloaf.