Tom Afflick has had his life torn apart by his mother who has taken him to Edinburgh when she left his father to set up home with her new boyfriend. Tom is an outsider and is shunned and bullied by everyone at his new school. On a school trip to Mary King's Close he falls through the floor and a bizarre adventure starts when he is transported back to the seventeenth century.
Timeslip novels are a popular way of introducing history into novels but this is no ordinary timeslip story. It's more of a slip/slide/crash/slip type story and while it contains a lot of important history, that's not it's focal point. It focuses on the fiction added on and has the reader wondering "alternate universes? dreams? changed timelines?". Frequently in timeslip stories you get a feeling that parts are merely a pretext to explain another part but this doesn't happen anywhere in Crow Boy - it just flows seamlessly along. It's exciting and engaging and readers won't want to put it down.
Extremely enjoyable and excellently done. This book will be enjoyed by readers of nine and older, surprisingly fifteen/sixteen year olds won't feel it's too young for them either. And while the hero is Tom, I can imagine it appealing to girls just as much.
Publisher - Fledgling Press
Genre - Children's/Teen's, historic, thriller
Buy Crow Boy
from Amazon
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