{Synopsis} – Misfit teen Lola Lundy has every right to her anger and her misery. She’s failing in school, living in a group home, and social workers keep watching her like hawks, waiting for her to show signs of the horrible mental illness that cost Lola’s mother her life. Then, one night, she falls asleep in a storage room in her high school library, where she’s seen an old yearbook—from the days when the place was an upscale academy for young scholars instead of a dump. When Lola wakes, it’s to a scene that is nothing short of impossible.
Lola quickly determines that she’s gone back to the past—eighty years in the past, to be exact. The Fall Frolic dance is going full blast in the gym, and there she makes an instant connection with the brainy and provocative Peter Hemmings, class of ’24. His face is familiar, because she’s seen his senior portrait in the yearbook. By night’s end, Lola thinks she sees hope for her disastrous present: She’ll make a new future for herself in the past. But is it real? Or has the major mental illness in Lola’s family background finally claimed her? Has she slipped through a crack in time, or into a romantic hallucination she created in her own mind, wishing on the ragged pages of a yearbook from a more graceful time long ago?
{My thoughts} – Lola Lundy is teenage girl that seems to have been born into the wrong era. She is an orphan as her mother had killed herself some years before and she doesn’t have a clue who her father is. She carries around the labels misfit, juvenile delinquent, and unwanted. She seems to get into more trouble then she is capable of staying out of. She also has fear of being diagnosed with the same kind of mental illness that her mother had suffered from.
One day when she goes to school she is trying to get away from someone so she ducks into the library. While she is in there the librarian gives her the key to the reserve room. In this room is where all the really old books are kept. Those books are part of the history of the school and the town and she is in there to throw them all in a big dumpster bin. There had been a fire that had broke out and destroyed nearly everything in the room and now she gets the pleasure of doing the clean up. She wasn’t meant to be there, but some how it had worked to her advantage because no one would be able to see her or find her in that room with the door closed. As she is cleaning up she runs across and old yearbook and she falls asleep looking through it.
When she wakes up she’s in a whole new era. In fact it’s 1923 and nothing she remembers from before she fell asleep is the same. She ends up attending a dance and meeting an incredible boy named Peter Hemmings. Some how though after the dance is over with she ends up back in present day and is not sure if it was a dream, mental break down or a real time leap, but in any case she is determined to try and find her way back to that point in time to be with Peter and the others she had met, to be in the one place where she feels she really belongs.
This book honestly had me a bit confused because I wasn’t sure where it was going. I was unsure for a majority of it as to whether her time travel was real or mental illness induced. I give credit to the author for keeping that mystery alive throughout most of the books pages. The part that confused me the most was how the time travel worked. When she’d went back in time the first time no time had changed in present day when she’d somehow leaped back. However, when she’d went back in time the second time weeks had passed in the past, but no time had changed in the present. When she’d went back the third time no time had passed in the past. The laws of time travel in this book, well in terms of a book that is ordinarily about time travel doesn’t usually work out like this.
Other then the nontraditional time travel within the pages it was a rather interesting read. I do like how the author was able to merge time travel and mental illness into one book and make it make sense. If you’d like to know more about the book you’ll have to read it, although I must warn you to keep an open mind while reading.
{Quotes I Enjoyed}
{01} – Lola braced herself for some ‘tough love’ or perhaps an inspirational slogan: Turn your wounds into wisdom. Life is what you make of it. Never quit.
{02} – She did not belong in this time. Her place was in another century, and the powers of the universe had conspired to reveal this mistake to her. In that other place, she’d fit in. She’d felt new and clean, her true self.
{03} – She was trapped in a “now” that had nothing to do with her, where she would always be something grotesque, a joke of a person.
{04} – Besides, the voice that had encouraged her to buy the clothes had grown louder, and she needed some peace and quiet to hear what else it might say. This wasn’t the kind of voice a crazy person hears, she answered herself, but a wisdom that seemed to come from deep inside her. It was a version of her own voice and she trusted it.
{05} – An image flashed into her thoughts: It was her, tangled in a long, heavy rope like the kind used in tug-of-war. On one end was the present, and on the other the past that she had visited, and both were exerting a force on her. The present had won for now. But the pull was still there. She could feel it.
{06} – The temptation to confess everything was almost irresistible. The secret, which had always been heavy, now seemed crushing. But she would not tell. No one could, or should believe such a thing. And to say it out loud was to be a freak again, a notorious freak and outcast. She was done with that forever.
{07} – You’re making me doubt my sanity, he’d said, as if feeling around the edges of extraordinary truth. -Peter
{08} – Lola considered herself a survivor, and a reasonably resourceful person. She’d kept her wits about her during all sorts of situations. But her sense of direction had always been poor, and her knowledge of nature right around zero.
{09} – If you hadn’t come to me, I would have found you. Somehow I would have. -Peter
{10} – “It’s an understandable reaction.” Dr. Schultz said one afternoon. “But escaping into fantasy isn’t a positive reaction to stress. It might feel good while its happening, like drugs or alcohol, but in the end its pulling you further and further away from a healthy life.
Final Conclusion: 5 Star Rating.
