Journey into the past.

This was the second time-travel book I'd listened to by this author, unfortunately from two different series. I preferred The Mirror (Northwest passage 05) to Class of '59 (American Journey 04), mainly because it was less confusing in the early chapters. I also favoured the narrator of The Mirror.

Ginny and Katie Smith, nineteen year old twins, have come from a family of time-travellers, and while they never expected to find themselves in another time, they seemed to have some awareness of how things worked and how to go about returning to their own time. However, they were aware that they needed to be very careful not to make significant changes in the past, and not to fall in love and leave heart-break behind them when they left. Whilst they pretty much achieved their first objective, they were far from achieving the second.

The era in which they find themselves is 1964, with the rise of The Beatles, the build-up of racial riots and the impending Vietnam disaster. This was also the era in which their great-grandmother lived. Meeting her and her daughter, their grandmother, was one of the highlights of their trip and they were able to fill her in on the fates of some of the people whom she'd loved and lost.

The characterisations were good and I loved the different social feel of a time when courtesy was the norm. The dialogue, however, was a bit stilted and I felt for the narrator in tackling an endless stream of 'he said, she said'.
Although this does work as a standalone, I was sorry I hadn't read the previous books in the series. I struggled with the the ending, which brought together the fates of all the previous characters and was rather confusing. I still plan to go over the last few chapters again to really understand who everyone was and how their roles in the story panned out.

I'm a bit surprised that this is not listed as a YA book as it struck me as a coming-of-age novel rather than adult fiction.

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