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Juvenile Fiction. Juvenile Literature. Science Fiction. HTML: Twelve-year-old Johnny Maxwell has a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. This has never been more true than when he finds himself in his hometown on May 21, 1941, over forty years before his birth! An accidental time traveler, Johnny knows his history. He knows England is at war, and he knows that on this day German bombs will fall on the town. It happened. It's history. And as Johnny and his friends quickly discover, tampering with history can have unpredictableâ??and drasticâ??effects on the future. But letting history take its course means letting people die. What if Johnny warns someone and changes history? What will happen to the future? If Johnny uses his knowledge to save innocent lives by being in the right place at the right time, is he doing the right thing? Mixing nail-biting suspense with outrageous humor, Terry Pratchett explores a classic time-travel paradox in Johnny Maxwell's third adventure… (more)
User reviews
Didn't feel like I was missing out on anything by missing second book, except Johnny's parents are suddenly separated.
Lots of very funny bits as well as references to the Discworld books.
A quick read
As it is, however, the last book in this trilogy treats readers to a thoughtful look about time travel and World War II. Pratchett presents a diverse look about the issues that come up between the time travel and war. He delivers many thoughtful ideas that can ruminate in one's mind for quite a while. Overall, this is a wonderful series of books series of books that are more lesson oriented than the Discworld books, but still very enjoyable and contemplative.
Such quirks -- and they're few -- don't really detract from the enjoyability of the book, which is considerable. Young Johnny Maxwell and his pals Wobbler, Yo-less, Bigmac and Kirsty, know old Mrs Tachyon as one of Blackbury's characters: babbling battily and pushing her decrepit supermarket trolley around town, her vicious cat Guilty aboard it among the numerous mysterious black plastic bags, the bag lady is hard to miss. When she's involved in an accident and has to be rushed to hospital, Johnny takes cart, bags and cat home for safekeeping in the family garage. Inadvertently manipulating one of the bags, he undergoes what one might call a spontaneous time-travel experience. It seems that what Mrs Tachyon has been storing in her bags is time. A little later, in a more controlled experiment, Johnny takes his chums with him, and they find they're in Blackbury as it was in 1941; moreover, Johnny realizes that it's not just any day in 1941 but the day leading up to the night he's just been reading about for his school history project, the night when a German bombing mission, off course, dropped its load on Blackbury's Paradise Street, causing huge damage and the loss of many lives.
Kirsty is the brains of the group; she's also widely regarded as insufferable, because of her intelligence, her pronounced feminism, and her pushiness . . . so I loved the character most of any in the book She has numerous good lines, but none (in my opinion) better than the one she comes out with on the pals' arrival in 1941:
"Oh dear, it's going to be that kind of adventure after all," she hissed, sitting up. "It's just the sort of thing I didn't want to happen. Me, and four token boys. Oh, dear. Oh, dear. It's only a mercy we haven't got a dog." (p83)
Johnny is keen to avert the night's tragedy; even so, he's aware of the Trousers of Time effect, that if you alter something in the past you can find yourself going down the wrong leg of the Trousers to arrive in a different future from the one you expected. Indeed, exactly this happens during the pals' various adventures when Wobbler, who's got separated from the rest, unwittingly manages to make his own grandfather (who at the time of encounter is Richmal Crompton's William Brown in all but name) a victim of the bombing raid, thereby cancelling out his own existence in a future to which the rest of the kids briefly return. (The section of the book featuring this subtly different alternative future is especially nicely handled.) In the end Johnny realizes the challenge is to get the air raid siren sounded in time that, while Paradise Road and its nearby pickle factory are destroyed, just as the old newspaper he read for his school project told him, the residents are able to get to their shelters. But this isn't as easy as it sounds, because the switch for the siren is in the police station in town, and will not be pulled until the rozzers hear from the lookout post on a distant hill; the storm that has misled the German bombers has blown out the phone from the lookout post, and the backup motorbike there won't start . . .
Like all the best kids' books, this holds as much to engage adults as most adult novels do, if not more. As noted, Kirsty's a joy; also wonderful among the characters is Yo-less, who's black but also, clashing with ignorant racial stereotypes, the class nerd -- a nerd so nerdish that, as is observed somewhere in the text, if you gave him a baseball cap he'd put it on the right way round. In connection with Yo-less, the book refreshingly confronts casual racism, in both past and present Blackbury, face-on: people do not mean their remarks and attitudes about Yo-less unkindly, not really, but they're fucking offensive all the same. At first Kirsty makes the excuse for them that "it's only the way they've been brought up" and tells Yo-less not to worry; but then, when she encounters some 1940s casual sexism, he tosses the same line back at her and she gets the point. The time-travel aspects of the tale are neatly worked out, as are the potentials for paradox. Much recommended.
What would you do? Where and when would you go? And if you had the chance to change something, would you?
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Read it back when I working really hard to appreciate the love my friends have for Pratchett, don't remember it now.
I think Pratchett does a good