From Publishers 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.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From School Library Journal
Grade 7-10?In 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 house?not 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 time?and 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
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
