Timeslip Tuesday

Timeslip Tuesday is the brain child of Charlotte at Charlotte's Library.

Bush, Penelope. Alice in Time.
Alice is tired of having to take care of her demanding brother, Rory. Her mother works hard, but there's little money because her parents are divorced and her mother has just remarried. When things also go badly at school with a catty girl and a boy that she likes, Alice finds herself on a playground where a trip on the merry-go-round causes her to bump her head and travel back to when she is seven. It's hard to settle back into her former self, but once she does, Alice determines that she will try to right some wrongs in her past-- keep her parents from divorcing, her cat from being hit by a car, and make life "hell" for the catty girl. Alice gains a lot of perspective into what her life was life at seven and learns things that she didn't know. When she makes as many changes as she thinks she can, she travels back to the present via merry-go-round to see what things are like now.

Strengths: All the reviews paint Alice as particularly bratty, but seeing what things she was dealing with makes her behavior seem excusable to a certain point. Her mother's post natal depression and her father's affair are hard even for a 14-year-old to handle, so I think that her behavior was realistic. The time travel is handled believably, and it's a strongly British book. Picky Reader, who loved Page's Rewind, is reading this now.
Weaknesses: The ending was a little too neat, even though it was fun!

Philosophical Question of the Day:
If you could go back to any day in time and start over, what day would it be? What things would you change?

I would go back to 9 July 1977, my twelfth birthday. I would start running, so I could be on the very first girls' cross country team at my high school. Instead of Latin, I would take Spanish, and I'd try to muster the strength to major in nursing rather than Latin in college. Of course, that would change everything else in my life, but it would keep unemployment at bay! Unfortunately, my phone will only let me go back to 1 January 1980, and I haven't paid for the unlimited time travel plan, so I will have to do my best without time traveling!