When I was growing up, one of my favorite books was Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer. Farmer’s novel chronicles the adventures of a boarding school student from the early ‘60s named Charlotte who switches places with a girl from 1918 named Clare. My interest in time travel books continued with Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, and was recently piqued once again by German author Kerstin Gier’s Ruby Red.
Set in present day London, the protagonist of Ruby Red is Gwyneth Shepherd, an ordinary teenage girl from an eccentric and extraordinary family. Many female members of Gwyneth’s family have inherited a gene that enables them to travel back in time, but that gene skipped over Gwyneth and was inherited instead by her cousin, Charlotte Montrose. Or so it seems. As Ruby Red opens, Charlotte is being groomed for life as a time traveler by her mother and grandmother, while Gwyneth enjoys life as an everyday teenager, hanging out with her best friend Lesley and going to the movies. However, Gwyneth’s everyday life includes speaking with ghosts, particularly James Augustus Peregrine Pympoole-Bothame, the resident ghost at her high school. And Gwyneth begins slipping back into the past at the most inconvenient times while Charlotte and her mother wait for her first time traveling experience.
It soon becomes clear that Gwyneth, not Charlotte, inherited the time traveling gene, a discovery which initially poses some problems for the family. Because everyone believed Charlotte inherited the gene, she received extensive instruction in the history and customs of the past while Gwyneth has none of Charlotte’s knowledge. Then there is the issue of Gwyneth’s mother, Grace; it seems that Grace did not want her daughter to be a time traveler so she bribed the midwife to put a false date of birth on Gwyneth’s birth certificate. Once the family accepts Gwyneth’s destiny as a time traveler, she begins to learn more about her unique lineage and the Guardians, a mysterious group that holds the family’s time traveling secrets. She also meets Gideon de Villiers, a handsome fellow time traveler and potential love interest.
Ruby Red is an enjoyable, fast paced read with just the right amounts of humor and romance added for good measure. Gwyneth Shepherd is an appealing heroine whose sense of curiosity and wonder at her newly discovered time traveling ability is quite believable. If given the opportunity, who wouldn’t want to bring a cell phone camera to the past? Among the supporting characters, the strongest is Gwyneth’s best friend Lesley, an amateur detective who relishes the opportunity to investigate the people and places Gwyneth encounters in her travels back in time.
Ruby Red is the first book in a trilogy; the next book, Sapphire Blue, will be released in the U.S. next spring.
Search the WRL Catalog for Ruby Red
I’ve long been curious about this book and now I’m even more intrigued. :-) The only thing I’m worried about is I read something very similar not too long ago – Timeless by Alexandra Monir. It was a decent read, but I hope these two books are distinctive enough to stand apart from one another.