Mr. Was

From the Publisher

* “Ingenious plotting and startling action combine to make this time-travel thriller a riveting read.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Hard to put down.”—Booklist

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Ingenious plotting and startling action combine to make this time-travel thriller a riveting read. Trying to escape from his violent father, Jack and his mother move into his late grandfather's mysterious house in Memory, Minn. There, the 13-year-old discovers a door that can hurtle him 50 years into the past. In the present day, Jack's father is rampaging: he calls the boy's mother a "hardheaded bitch," breaks her fingers and eventually kills her with a baseball bat. Jack escapes through the time-travel door, planning to wait 50 years and prevent the crime. Unbeknownst to him, he is becoming entangled in his own family's ugly history: past and future are irremediably entangled. Jack's strange destiny takes him from the bloody battles of WW II Guadalcanal to a government-run mental institution, where he suffers amnesia and a drug-induced type of catatonia. The only real flaw in this feverish page-turner is the pedestrian heaviness of the dialogue. Hautman, the author of three adult novels, can otherwise be commended: his structure is sophisticated without ever overwhelming the reader, and mined with surprises that explode like fireworks. Ages 12-up. Oct.

Children's Literature - Mary Sue Preissner

Chapters in this perplexing science fiction work are presented as coming from four various notebooks. John Lund, a child of an abusing, alcoholic father and a timid mother, travels far and wide to escape his life. After dreaming of a hidden door in his grandfather's dilapidated home, he locates it and is transported several times to different time periods in both the lives of the strange house and that of his grandfather. Readers will be riveted to both this science fiction adventure and this story of a child coming to terms with reality.

Children's Literature - Tim Whitney

After Jack witnesses his mother's brutal murder by his alcoholic father, he travels through a mysterious door in his grandfather's home and ends up in an earlier time. He decides to grow up there, so that in 55 years he can prevent his mother's death, but a jealous friend and World War II stand in his way. The story is told very effectively by a series of four notebooks found in 1952 by Jack's father. Suspense and mystery will keep the reader glued to this book until the end, when all of the pieces of the puzzle eventually come together. Fans of science fiction and the theme of time travel will love this book.

School Library Journal

Gr 7-10In this convoluted time-travel story from an adult novelist, a teenager walks through a more or less 50-year "door" in an old house, and falls in love with his own grandmother. After his alcoholic father murders his mother and then goes out in the yard to hang himself, Jack Lund travels back to 1941, where he befriends Scud, an enterprising young hustler, and his fiancee, Andie. Jack and Andie warm to each other. By the time Scud finds out, he and Jack are in the Marines on Guadalcanal; after a savage fight Scud leaves Jack for dead, goes off to marry Andie, has a daughter Jack's mother, and makes a fortune with the help of a 1996 stock-market page young Jack has by chance brought with him. Alive but disfigured and totally amnesiac, Jack a.k.a. Mr. Was spends the next 50 years as a mental patient, beginning to recover only after some illicit acupuncture. He escapes, and travels to his old housenot in time to save his mother, but in time to help his father along with his suicide. Enter Pinky Boggs, apparently a time cop of some sort, who haphazardly destroys evidence of the door's existence and tells Jack that a much older Andie is waiting for him in 1946. Jack goes through the door one last timeand there she is. Hautman devotes less effort to explanations or tying up loose ends than to detailed descriptions of violence, stretching out his account of Jack's parents' deteriorating relationship and throwing in bloody visions when the action lags. Jack is more a vehicle the story is framed as a series of journals and letters than a character, showing wear but little growth or change. For a lighter, more logically consistent time-loop story, steer readers to Robert Heinlein's oldie-but-still-goodie, The Door into Summer Del Rey, 1986.John Peters, New York Public Library

Kirkus Reviews

Hautman (for adults, The Mortal Nuts, p. 622, etc.) combines the elements of mystery, science fiction, and domestic violence in his compelling and unrelentingly grim first novel for teenagers.

When his grandfather Skoro dies, teenage Jack Lund and his mother journey to the old man's mansion in the aptly named town of Memory. Jack discovers a hidden doorway that transports him back fifty years, and he travels back and forth in time easily. Following the murder of his mother at the hands of his alcoholic father, Jack flees permanently into the past, vowing to live through the years leading up to his mother's death and prevent it. But life in the less-technological past proves just as complicated as the present: Jack falls in love with Andie, but rather than form the third corner of a romantic triangle, he enlists in and barely survives WW II. Jack eventually recovers and remembers his quest. Confronting life's tragedies and integrating them is one of the novel's themes, and so Jack's destiny remains regretfully unalterable. He finds some manner of happiness through a complicated leap of temporal mechanics, but it may not hearten younger readers when weighed against the unsentimental portrayal of an alcoholic household and the bloody murder. More sophisticated readers, however, will find the realism refreshing and enjoy solving the conundrum of Jack's life.