Meryam throws herself into the busyness of everyday life as best she can, but can barely distract from her conviction that her mother is still alive. Reading along, I expected Bandon to be a typical YA distraction, and Meryam to find connections to her grandmother, and for her to find some big sense of purpose, and to an extent these things happen....except that Bandon is gay (and says so right at the beginning), her grandmother not really the connecting type, and her sense of purpose external to her own life is sort of a one shot deal.
But there's also the distraction of time travel. A mysterious woman, Serakh, shows up out of nowhere in Meryam's house, explaining that women in past generations of Meryam's family have been in the habit of time travelling to do necessary things in the past, and that now she has come to take Meryam back in the past to do a necessary thing--to save a little girl in 16th century Constantinople from slavery. And there in the past the thread of her own story is twisted, all to briefly, with a bit of her mother's. Time travel with Serakh is made easy with universal language comprehension, and though there are difficulties and twists to the adventure in the past that made things interesting, I didn't read it with the same intent immersion as I did the story of Meryam's present day life.
That being said, it's a book I recommend with conviction (I read it first in January, and have just now read it again, and didn't mind in the least!) but I'm not convinced that the time travel is sufficiently integrated into the central narrative of Meryam's life. I think that even if it were cut out completely, there'd still be a really good, really solid YA sci-fi-ish story to enjoy. That being said, I didn't mind the time travel, and it does give both Meryam and the reader plenty of food for thought....but it was fairly mundane time travel compared to the details of Meryam's real life which I found much more interesting (this could be just me, as I tend to enjoy lots of description of mundane details of house and garden tasks, which is perhaps Sad, as Donald Trump would say, but there it is). So in the end, I'd really suggest reading this one for a fascinating near future YA growing up/coping with grief story, at which it excels!
This is the third book by Ruth Tenzer Feldman about Serakh and the blue thread that binds her to Meryam's family, the others being Blue Thread, and The Ninth Day, both of which I'm going to look for now for future timeslip Tuesdays!
disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher
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