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Book Review: My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time, by Liz Jensen

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It’s 1897 and lady-of-the-night/morning/afternoon Charlotte comes up with a brilliant idea to enable her to afford enough fine dresses, food, and schnapps to get through the cold winter. She and Fru Schleswig, a woman who followed her to Copenhagen from the orphanage she grew up in, claiming to be her mother, will clean the home of Fru Krak, a local widow with delusions of aristocracy. Fru Frak, soon to be married to a pastor, is fond of daytime shopping trips; with her out of the house, Charlotte will steal and sell as many of the Kraks’ valuable ornaments and household goods as she can.

But after Charlotte hears some intriguing stories about the missing and presumed dead Professor Krak, she can’t keep herself from investigating the mysterious locked basement. What she finds there is a device that saves her life and transports her, rather roughly, across time to modern day London, where her adventures continue in a way she could never have imagined.

I had a lot of fun reading My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time, and it was a great choice to take on holiday. I loved the premise, along with Charlotte’s personality (though not her penchant for ampersands) and shameless money making-schemes. She is a very funny narrator, vain but charming, bold and cunning. But as the story progresses, she becomes less active and more of an observer, and although I still enjoyed it, I felt that some of the magic was lost as the tale progressed.

I think it was largely the fault of the love story, which seemed very rushed. Charlotte meets her lover, and in the space of a few pages, they are in a serious relationship. It seemed like the author wanted to focus more on the time travel, which would have been fine except that Charlotte has little interest in either the mechanics or in actually travelling all over time and the world. After some initial excitement, she doesn’t even seem that thrilled by modern-day London, and she doesn’t spend much time exploring it, which was a shame because I really wanted to see what she thought about my home. There are other characters that do more in the way of time travel, but we only find out what they got up to through Charlotte.

I would still recommend it to people looking for an amusing, easy read. It’s an entertaining, silly adventure, with a few mysteries along the way.

Book Review: The New Girl, by Emily Perkins

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In an unnamed town, during a hot, dry summer, Julia, Chicky and Rachel are celebrating the end of school and waiting for the exam results that will determine their futures, whilst trying to decide what to do next. Although their town is dull – so boring that they sign up to a free class at the local library – it’s a difficult place to leave. Everything they’ve ever known is here, and only Julia really thinks that she might leave, inspired by Miranda, their beautiful, charming new teacher.

But Miranda is no angel, having come to escape the city, and the mistakes she made at university. She seems like a positive influence, a breath of fresh air with big ideas and pretty dresses, but the longer she stays, the more her darker side comes out, and her presence cannot remain benign.

The main protagonists are Julia and Miranda, though the novel cycles through many other points of view. I found them both really interesting. Miranda is a narcissist dressed up in Manic Pixie Dream Girl clothing – black hair, fringe, and all. She enjoys inspiring people and getting them to adore her. She’s convinced that she knows best and doesn’t care about the emotional fallout of her actions. Julia is naïve but intelligent, and she knows that she has to leave the town if she wants to do anything really exciting with her life, though she has a strong emotional connection to her friends and family, especially Chicky, Rachel, and her mother.

I also loved reading about Julia’s mother, Mary, who had Julia when she was young, and is now a kind woman who loves her daughter and husband, but is aware of everything she missed out on by staying in the small town. She struggles with her husband’s lack of interest in their daughter, and with the possiblity that Julia might leave.

There were some characters that I would have liked to read more about, and some scenes that seemed skipped over. When Miranda first comes to the town, she goes to meet the local women, most of them mothers, at a party hosted by the woman who hired her to teach, Gretchen. We only get to read about the party before Miranda arrives, and I would have liked to have seen how it went. I would also have liked to find out more about Chicky and Rachel, especially Chicky, who is brash and brave and yet seemingly content to stay in the town.

I’d like to read more books that deal with these type of issues – books about deciding what to do next, about the mistakes new adults can make when dealing with people who have been adults for a lot longer than they have. If you like the idea of ‘New Adult’ but not the fact that most of the books sold under that category are romances, give this a try and let me know what you think, though it is literary fiction – rather than NA or YA – because the story is sometimes told from the parents’ point of view. If you have any recommendations for me, please do leave a comment!