My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time

April 3, 2006
When 25-year-old Charlotte Schleswig begins telling her madcap tale in 1897, she's a successful prostitute roaming the suburban streets near Denmark's capital. A random meeting in a bakery leads her to begin working as a domestic for Fru Krak, an anxious woman whose husband has recently disappeared under mysterious circumstances and who may now be haunting the very streets Charlotte walks. Charlotte soon sets out to find the missing Professor Krak, and in the course of her investigations discovers 21st-century London, a whole new world of mobile phones, microwaves, flavored condoms, suicide machines and a handsome archeologist named Fergus. Jensen (The Ninth Life of Louis Drax
) satisfactorily coats a predictable romance with a shiny time-traveling sci-fi glaze, mixes a dash of irony and suspense, and pushes it all through Charlotte's energetic first person, which carries the book. The final result is fun and sometimes scintillating, but not necessarily delicious—like a flavored condom.