Annette Laing

The book is "Look Ahead, Look Back" by Annette Laing ( it's #3 in the Snipesville Chronicles). I was a little leary at first reading this ,do to my not having read number one or two in the Snipesville Chronicle series . As I started reading though I found that I didn't have any reason to doubt that I wouldn't be able to follow along with the story line . It had my attention from the start and kept me wanting to keep reading more. This book is probably intended for a younger audience, but I found it to be a enjoyable read even for us 'older' readers . It tells the story of three kids who are time travelers. They travel back to the year 1752 ,the people they meet and the discoveries they encounter trying to solve a mystery in the present time. The discoveries they make in the past ( 1752) helps them solve a mystery now. It touches on slavery and injustice at that time and the hardships people suffered through in that time in history in America and England. You can tell that the author did her research well to make the facts as historically accurate as possible .I really enjoyed this book and because of that I and would also like to read the first two books in the series by this author.
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Laing has done it again! She's managed to cram a whole lot of information into an entertaining story (with a bit of actual danger thrown in this time) and created a dizzying web of characters connected to each other, the characters in the previous book, and Hannah, Brandon, and Alex's present day lives. Some of these connections are pretty obvious (the Gordons that Hannah lives with are the grandparents of Mr. Gordon from the first book and a young girl in Balesworth who is the spitting image of Verity turns out to be her great-grandma), but that certainly didn't detract from their stories. And most of the connections I didn't see coming until the series of big reveals toward the end. I think that's the most amazing thing about these books for me: how some of the details all work out so seamlessly without being so obvious that I figured them out halfway through the book.

Hannah, Brandon, and Alex thought they had things bad in WWII England, but their experiences in the last book are nothing compared to what each of them goes through in 1851. Alone. In 1851, all three of them are considered adults, expected to earn a wage and take care of themselves. They each have to deal with this realization and figure out how to make their own ways and survive before they can even begin to think about how to find each other and get back home. The way that the book shifts between their stories was very clear and easy to follow. And for anyone (like me) for whom the year 1851 doesn't ring a bell, they are doing this all in the midst of preparations for Prince Albert's Great Exhibition and a growing disapproval across England and Scotland of the lingering institution of slavery in America.

Alex, still in Snipesville, comes face to face with slavery. As he travels to Savannah looking for work, he is accompanied by a slave, Jupe, who is about his age. No matter how he tries to treat Jupe as an equal, Jupe never opens up to him or fully trusts him. Alex does manage to keep Jupe with him by lying about who legally owns him, keeping Jupe from being arrested, punished, or sold because he ran away. The situation with Jupe is complicated by the fact that Alex genuinely likes his employer, even though Mr. Thornhill buys and sells slaves in the course of his land sale transactions. The question of how otherwise good people could participate in or even condone slavery is never answered here, which is probably as it should be.

Hannah and Brandon are free from the emotional and intellectual turmoil that Alex must endure in 1851. Instead they're both left in horrible working and conditions by their trip back in time. Brandon "comes to" already in the pitch black dark of a coal mine and eventually makes his way back to Balesworth. On the way he lives in a workhouse, becomes a professional mourner, and is, once again, a novelty to those around him. People assume that Brandon is a former slave, especially after he tells people that he was born in America. Many people, especially the upper class women, want to know Brandon's thoughts on the subject and want to hear all about his experiences. The fact that he has to fabricate these experiences based on what he learned in history classes doesn't seem to bother anyone.

Hannah has the most tumultuous time. She's forced to be a piecer in a mill, first cotton and then jute, and earns pennies a week. She's fired twice and almost starves to death in between. She has a lot to complain about, but what Hannah is the most worried about is her lack of shopping opportunities. Her attitude is, once again, off-putting for most of the book. At some point during her ordeal, it seems like Hannah may be learning something from the life she's living. She makes friends and finds herself in a family; she agitates for workers' rights (to hang out in the park) and gives an upper class woman who lives off mill profits the scare of her life by walking her through a tenement neighborhood. Still, as soon as she is rescued by the Professor and given a fancy dress and a bit of pocket money, all those hard-learned lessons fall right out of her head and she goes shopping.

Even with my disappointment in Hannah's character development, or lack thereof, I really enjoyed A Different Day, A Different Destiny. I also learned a lot about the working class in the British Empire during the Industrial Revolution and British involvement in the American Abolitionist Movement.

Book source: Review copy provided by the author.… (mehr)

I'll admit, the opening of this book was a little slow for me. All the time spent with Hannah and Alex before they go back in time (and before they even get to Georgia), didn't really do anything for me. BUT, if you stick it out through Hannah's whining about how unfair her life is (actually, this continues throughout the book), they'll meet up with Brandon and end up in WWII England where things get very cool. In WWII England, Hannah, Alex and Brandon are all evacuees for the London, sent to the English countryside to escape the Blitz. Hannah and Alex are taken in by an almost welcoming couple. Brandon, who is black, is taken back to London. Though black children were also evacuated during the bombings of London, it was much harder to find people to take them in. Also, black people weren't all that common in England during this time, so Brandon spends the entire book being kind of a novelty. Hannah and Alex are left to get used to the British countryside during the war and desperately try to find out what happened to Brandon in a society that doesn't tell unpleasant things to children. Meanwhile, Brandon runs away from the man who took him back to London and is presumed dead after a bombing.

But he's not dead; he's really in WWI England. He's even in the same town as Hannah and Alex, just 25 years earlier! Brandon manages to find friendly people (with some help) and even a job, but being black is a much rarer thing in 1915 than it was in 1940. And the attitudes toward black people weren't all that great either. In her acknowledgments, Laing states that the past is not particularly politically correct, which is true, and neither is her portrayal of it. The scenes set both in 1915 and in 1940 are rich in historical detail, including the attitudes of the people in them. While Alex seems to go along pretty fine throughout the story, Hannah is constantly bristled by the treatment of children (what she considers a beating, everyone else considers a well-deserved spanking) and Brandon is constantly affected by peoples reactions to him as a "colored" young man. Though Brandon makes it through his time traveling experience suffering from nothing more than hateful words, the black people he meets both during The Great War (WWI) and WWII do not fare as well.

I managed to get completely caught up in this book. There is a story inside a story that needs solving in order for Hannah, Alex and Brandon to make it back to 21st century Georgia, and though they don't understand how or why, it is connected to their present day lives. Also, given that he's in the same town, Brandon's experiences in 1915 England have some really close ties to the people he, Hannah and Alex meet in WWII England. There were so many ways that all of these connections and different-name-same-person instances could have been screwed up or over simplified, but Laing manages to make them all make sense and even manages to make some of them surprising. My only disappointment in this area was Peggy, and it totally wasn't Laing's fault. I simply wanted 1915 Peggy to grow up to be a different person, but not everyone can live up to their full potential (I'm still angry about who she grew up to be, but I don't want to ruin the surprise).

In short, this is a great time travel book. I wasn't so caught up in the logistics of the time traveling that I lost the ability to be caught up in the times where they ended up. It's also a great look at the day-to-day lives of some of the people left behind in England during the fighting of each world war.

Book source: Review copy provided by the author

PS - This book has a new cover, not shown here, which is a big improvement!… (mehr)

This is book one in "The Snipesville Chronicles. It's a fun and informative book about a group a kids who travel through time, to England during WWI and WWII. Besides learning about the hardships of the wars, they also learn other historical facts, especially how fortunate they are due to modern conveniences. They also learn the importance of acceptance and of being accepted and the strength of friendship.

This is a very good book that's full of emotion and I would recommend it to adults as well as children.… (mehr)