Synopsis
When Patricia's mother sends her to her cousins' cottage for the summer, Patricia doesn't want to go. She doesn't know her cousins at all, and she's never been good at camping or canoeing, let alone making new friends.
When she arrives at the cottage, her worst fears come true: her cousin Kelly teases her; Aunt Ginnie and Uncle Doug feel sorry for her. She doesn't fit in. Then Patricia discovers an old watch hidden under a floorboard. When she winds it, she finds herself taken back in time to the summer when her own mother was twelve ...
Author Biography: A former librarian, Kit Pearson is the author of five children's novels, all published by Penguin Canada. She has won many awards for her writing, including the Governor General's Award and the Ruth Schwartz Award for Awake and Dreaming.
School Library Journal
Gr 5-8 An important summer in the life of 12-year-old Patricia Potter involves a trip back in time for her to observe her mother, Ruth, in her mother's twelfth year. While her parents, both successful career people in Toronto, work out a separation, Patricia is sent off to her aunt's lake cottage in Alberta. Raised by fashionable and undemonstrative parents, Patricia feels out of place in the company of her rough-and-tumble cousins. Her escape comes when she discovers an old watch engraved to her grandmother, Patricia. When she winds up the watch she becomes an invisible observer to the happenings that took place in her mother's family 35 years ago. Patricia goes back and forth in time, observing her mother's unhappy childhood, and she decides to give her mother another chance, knowing what she does about the past. Although the novel is about two generations of mother-daughter relationships, all readers see of the grown-up mothers, Ruth and Nan, is from the perspective of a child. Hence, both appear as wooden and flat characters. Although the watch device is a handy one to allow the girl a glimpse of the past, there is not much explanation as to how or why the watch possesses this power. Science fiction fans may be disappointed, but the book will show adolescents how relationships in the present are often locked into patterns of the past, and that a discovery of one's family often reveals much about oneself. Yvonne A. Frey, Peoria Public Library, Ill.