Curious Notions

October 1, 2004
Time travel and its fascinating paradoxes get surprisingly slack treatment in the second episode (after Gunpowder Empire) of Turtledove's Crosstime Traffic series. Crosstimer Lawrence Gomes, a 21st-century entrepreneur who travels to alternate time lines to trade for goods and services, and his teenage son, Paul, sidestep to a world where Germany won WWI and still dominates the globe. They set up a shop called Curious Notions in San Francisco to sell electronic equipment, but their state-of-the-art wares quickly arouse the suspicions of both the occupying German constabulary and crime lords of the local Chinese triads. Plucky Paul complicates matters when he befriends Lucy Woo, a working girl whose family is inadvertently swept up in their cat-and-mouse game with the authorities. Turtledove does his usual fine job of developing the alternate history, but he lets other details slip: he never explains why Paul and his father, who hope to conduct business unobtrusively, call attention to themselves by selling blatantly futuristic goods, and he makes the Gomes's German and Chinese pursuers seem so easily outsmarted that the plot never develops tension or suspense. A finale in which Paul is saved from a predicament by miraculous intervention, rather than through his own resourcefulness, may disappoint the target audience of younger readers who might otherwise identify with its teenage hero and his colorful adventures.

October 11, 2004
Time travel and its fascinating paradoxes get surprisingly slack treatment in the second episode (after Gunpowder Empire) of Turtledove's Crosstime Traffic series. Crosstimer Lawrence Gomes, a 21st-century entrepreneur who travels to alternate time lines to trade for goods and services, and his teenage son, Paul, sidestep to a world where Germany won WWI and still dominates the globe. They set up a shop called Curious Notions in San Francisco to sell electronic equipment, but their state-of-the-art wares quickly arouse the suspicions of both the occupying German constabulary and crime lords of the local Chinese triads. Plucky Paul complicates matters when he befriends Lucy Woo, a working girl whose family is inadvertently swept up in their cat-and-mouse game with the authorities. Turtledove does his usual fine job of developing the alternate history, but he lets other details slip: he never explains why Paul and his father, who hope to conduct business unobtrusively, call attention to themselves by selling blatantly futuristic goods, and he makes the Gomes's German and Chinese pursuers seem so easily outsmarted that the plot never develops tension or suspense. A finale in which Paul is saved from a predicament by miraculous intervention, rather than through his own resourcefulness, may disappoint the target audience of younger readers who might otherwise identify with its teenage hero and his colorful adventures.

Copyright 2004 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2004
In twenty-first-century San Francisco, Paul Gomes and his father, Lawrence, run a consumer electronics store. There's a catch, however, for theirs is an alternate San Francisco under the occupation of the kaiser's Germany. The Gomeses are from a time line that invented cross-time travel and are trading portable radios and record players for food. But the Germans are growing suspicious, and once the Woo family becomes involved, so do the Chinese tongs or triads, and they are anything but mythical. Since the book's main time line contains the technology to duplicate cross-time devices if their existence were to be learned, the German suspicions put Curious Notions (the name of the Gomeses' shop) in a position of exceptional awkwardness. Paul compounds the situation by getting sweet on Lucy Woo, which leads him to run more risks than he should before his home time line sends in the cavalry. A well-constructed world, superior characterization, and some serious analysis of the ethics of cross-time travel all make the yarn a winner.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)