Time Ghost - Hardcover

Katz, William Loren

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0689800274 ISBN 13: 9780689800276

Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry, 1995

Synopsis

Recommended ages 9-12: Ottawa, 2030. The city is covered by a dome to protect people from pollution. There are only a few spots of real wilderness left in the world. With her parents off at a symposium on Luna One, twelve-year-old Sara at first isn't much interested in her grandmother's plans to take her and her older brother, Karl, on a trip to the North Pole. She feels safe living in crowded Ottawa under its protective dome, and besides, she couldn't care less about her grandmother's latest environmental crusade -- trying to stop a developer from drilling for oil under the polar ice cap. Things start to look up when she and Karl manage to bring their best friends, Danielle and Josh, along on the trip. But not even Dani can really understand Sara's secret fear of facing open spaces for the first time in her life. And the boys, it turns out, have a secret of their own -- a mysterious experiment that could prove Josh's theory that the North Pole is a doorway to another time, if only they could find the right key to unlock it. But it is the girls, not the boys, who discover the truth. Suddenly everything Sara and Dani are used to vanishes, and they are transported to a past where Sara must possess her own grandmother's twelve-year-old body, and Dani must become a ""Time Ghost."" Can they get back to their own time? And if they do, can they use what they learned of the 1990's to help prevent what is happening to their own world of the 21st century?

About this title

From School Library Journal:

Grade 5-8?Sara, 12; her best friend, Dani; and their older brothers accompany Sara's grandmother, chief legal advisor to a Greenpeace-like environmental group, on a trek to the Arctic regions. Life in the 21st century is lived mostly indoors, since there isn't much safe, unpolluted outdoors left. That's fine with Sara, who experiences severe agoraphobia at the prospect of stepping out into the open spaces of the North Pole. Her grandmother, however, remembers the unspoiled wilderness of her youth and is determined to protect any that remains; and Dani longs to see real nature. Dani's brother hopes to experiment with time travel, theorizing that all time zones converge at the North Pole to create a dimension where all times coexist. It is the girls, though, who are catapulted into the past, Sara into the body of her grandmother at 12, and Dani into a nebulous existence as a time ghost. At this point the tone of the story changes from futuristic science fiction to old-fashioned time-travel fantasy. What feels like the distant past to the girls is 1993, the year Grandmother Green's father sold his land to developers. By living through the events that made the woman a crusader for the environment, Sara begins to understand her point of view. Then she and Dani must figure out how to return to their own century. Katz tells an absorbing story while delivering a serious ecological message.?Susan L. Rogers, Chestnut Hill Academy, PA
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly:

Katz (Whalesinger) combines fantasy, science fiction and ecological issues in this appealing tale of time travel, set in the 21st century with excursions to the year 1993. Sara's activist grandmother takes her two grandchildren and their best friends out of their enclosed city to the North Pole, where she is protesting impending oil-drilling. But when Sara and her friend Dani break an antique pendant, the two girls find themselves transported back in time, with Sara inside her then-adolescent grandmother's body and Dani a "time ghost" outside a body. Their travels produce a solution to the conflict between Sara's grandmother and the oil-drillers. Katz, while dwelling a bit lengthily on the process enabling time-tripping, draws stimulating comparisons between the "past" and the girls' own era (Sara and Dani have never seen a real horse, only an image on the "televid"; they marvel over the long-ago custom of women changing their names upon marriage). The environmentalist message comes through strongly, yet it stifles neither the characters nor the plot. Ages 9-12.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0689800274
• ISBN 13: 9780689800276
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176