From School Library Journal
Grade 5-8-Connor Chase and his sister lead an overscheduled life with two successful working parents. Meals consist of fast foods and microwave dinners, and homework is completed by the light of TV or video games. Then one day he comes home to find that his mother has gotten rid of the televisions, computers, and extra phones in the house, and is actually cooking dinner. Even stranger are her weird clothes, old-fashioned haircut, and the art book she tries to keep hidden, which, as Connor discovers, shows her as the model for pictures by a long-dead painter, Fitzgerald Cotton. When she starts having strange seizurelike episodes that leave her frozen and terrified, Connor grabs the book and is thrown back in time to 1924 to the studio and home of Cotton, where he finds the man painting his mother in the same frozen pose. To save her, he enlists the help of Cotton's niece and nephew and convinces the man that the painting and the ancient paints that belonged to an evil ancestor must be destroyed. Reiss tells most of the story from Connor's point of view and his narration doesn't always sound like an 11-year-old boy's voice. However, the villain's sections from 15th-century Italy, related in the third person, are creepy and suspenseful. While Reiss goes overboard in making the point that life in the past was slower and generally more enjoyable, the story is unusual and compelling and readers will want to know how everything is resolved.
Lisa Prolman, Greenfield Public Library, MACopyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
Gr. 4-6. Reiss' eerie time travel mystery will snag readers on the first page and hold them until the last. It all begins with a fifteenth-century Italian painter, whose evil power stretches beyond his death, possessing a descendent in 1920s California and a woman living in the early-twenty-first century. For 11-year-old Connor, it starts when he gets home from school one day to find his mother has suddenly become an old-fashioned homemaker and is experiencing strange seizures. It's not until Connor is transported back in time to 1926 that he comes to understand what has happened. Can he save his mother? By the author of
Time Windows (1991), the story is as much a compelling mystery as it is a paean to "the good old days," when families ate meals and socialized together, and a telling look at today's busy families, with members eating on the run and spending little time interacting. The combination will attract a broad readership.
Sally EstesCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
