Emerald Green by Kerstin Gier

Title: Emerald Green
Author: Kerstin Gier
Publisher: Henry Holt
Rating: WARTY!

I started blogging novels just this year, and the first two novels I blogged were the first two of the Edelstein (or Ruby Red) trilogy, so it's fitting that I end this year with a review of the final volume of the trilogy, Emerald Green You can read my review of Ruby Red and of Sapphire Blue.

Once you've skipped the prologue as I did (this is the third in a trilogy! Were not the two previous volumes prologue enough, for goodness sakes?! Enough with the worthless prologues!) this novel starts out with the ultimate in cut-price fakery: Gwen having a nightmare of being stabbed in the heart. That cheap fraud was entirely unappreciated, but it does have a small bearing on a prediction her supposedly psychic relative makes later in the novel. Then we're plunged into Gwen's rather tiresome moping over leading male Major Jerk Gideon (that's not his rank and name, it's merely his entire personality). Gier repeats this type of cheap thrill again at the end of chapter nine. I thought she was a more seasoned writer than that.

I love Gier's trilogy, but for pity's sake can we not find any YA writers who can write a decent love story? The fact that this is a juvenile novel does not automatically entail a juvenile romance! Can we not find YA writers who can write a novel which actively teaches young women that pricks like like Gideon are not worth an ounce of emotion or a teaspoonful of tears? Must we brainwash our young women into thinking it's okay, even normal, to be a puppet in some manipulative scum-wad of a guy's self-idolization side-show? That it's okay to be abused and ill treated? Seriously, something needs to be done about this.

Gier does provide some humor (notably from Gwen's awesome friend Lesley) that lightens the load, and the 'fairy dies' remark was hilarious and very welcome, but even the humor is severely retrenched as compared with the first two volumes. Lesley carried the first volume, and Xemerius the animated gargoyle carried the second, but no one is shouldering that task in the third and it suffers for it. Gier doesn't lard-up the pages with tragedy anywhere near as thickly as some other writers do, but it's still tedious to read repeated references to "Gwen's tragic love life" on page after page after page. We get it. She broke up and she's broken up. Enough already. If I wanted to read reams of trash like that I'd buy a Harlequin or a Mills & Boon for goodness sakes!

In this volume, it turns out that Gwen is really Harry Potter and must die before they can be free of the evil! I am not making this up. On the good side of things, Gwen does start taking charge of her own life at this point, which is a welcome relief. Aside from her sorry and debilitating poor judgment with regard to Gideon the Asshat, she's making her own decisions and not at all willing to be buffeted around by the winds of male whim. She even makes a time travel trip when she's already in a time travel trip, which was much welcomed, and very cool. Nothing bizarre happened from it, however, which I confess I found a bit disappointing!

She finally starts to get somewhat suspicious of Count Saint-Germain, which is about bloody time, but even when she tries to impress upon Gideon how important this is, he's still a jerk. Her sister Charlotte is a jerk, too. The 'no-one is telling anyone anything' rule is still in play, so despite Gwen's importance to this project, no one is telling her a thing, not even her "mother" whom I have long suspected actually isn't her mother.

We do finally get the reverse angle on the scene from the first novel where, on her third accidental time-travel trip, Gwen sees herself in an upstairs classroom at her school. We also get a rather limp attempt by Gier to explain away one of the big issues I had in the first two volumes with this urgency to have Gwen do this on that date and time, and do that on this date and time. She can time travel for goodness sakes! It doesn't matter if she goes to the ball on this day or ten years from now - it's in the past and she can go there whenever she wants! Nor does Gier's "explanation" cover the fact that there were mysterious events in the past which a quick and surreptitious time-travel trip would have resolved, but for unexplained reasons, no one ever did this or even thought of it! Amateur hour.

Gier's excuse is that the Count is orchestrating all this and calls the shots, but neither Gwen nor I bought this! And personally, I see no reason whatsoever for her to actually go to this ball at all - except that there's this serious fracas at the ball (which would not have taken place if she and Gideon had not been there). Nothing else happens, so this stands out as no more than a really weak attempt at plotting on Gier's part.

So in the end, for once, I was pretty much right about everything I'd predicted for this trilogy! You know the writing's bad if my guesses are good. I never thought I'd do this after enjoying the first two volumes so well, but I have no choice but to rate this volume as warty. The story was dull; I found myself skipping page after page because it was, quite simply, uninteresting. The secrets were not even secret. Gwen's tiresome behavior was, well, tiresome. Gideon's big reveal that oh-so-predictably won her clueless heart in the end did nothing to excuse his behavior. The ending went on for far longer that was tenable, dragging out forever with tedious and pointless fancy dress party, and then a lousy excuse for a showdown that was over before it got underway. The epilogue wasn't worth reading. Sorry, but WARTY! What a horrid way to end the year - and to wait so long to end it this way! Then it was Twenty-THIRTEEN...!

Sapphire Blue By Kerstin Gier

Title: Sapphire Blue
Author: Kerstin Gier
English language publisher: Macmillan
Rating: WORTHY!

Sapphire Blue was originally published in 2009 in German as Saphirblau with a subtitle evidently common to all three books in the trilogy: liebe geht durch alle zeiten (love goes through all times). This is book 2 in the Ruby Red trilogy (also know as the Edelstein trilogy). It's preceded by Ruby Red (published as Rubinrot in 2009) and is followed by Emerald Green (published in German as Smaragdgrün in 2010, in English in 2013). The English language translator is Anthea Bell.

After I’d read Ruby Red (Ruby read?!), I went to review the reviews about it, and I did the same after Sapphire Blue. I read the reviews afterwards because I hadn't wanted to encounter any real spoilers, but I found that my fear was unfounded: I never would have happened upon spoilers because most reviewers don't tell you a darned thing about the stories, they discuss only the reviewers' emotions! They're like those movie reviews that don't tell you squat about the movie but reveal only how self-obsessed the reviewer is, a critic (in the most common sense) who evidently had one semester of 'Film as a Gut Form 101' at some college or other and insists that everyone should fetishise that.

It's like when everybody was supposed to stop eating grapes. I didn't because I like grapes. (Those last two sentences are a quote from a movie. Kudos if you know the movie. If you don't, go find it and watch it! It's hilarious! I'll wait.) As far it it goes for me in reviews, please lose the pretension, lose the immodest delusion that you're a despot monarch and we must therefore obey your every capricious whim. Just tell me what was in the book, toss in some trivia if you like, but I don't really care what emotions it stirred or whether you recommend it (unless, of course, your thoughts are liberally sprinkled with amusing asides), since I don't know you well enough to reliably place a value on your imprimatur.

One review I read was evidently written by someone even younger than Gwen; it consisted only of a single sentence declaring that the reviewer loved the story, therefore I should too! Seriously? That's not a review, that's a recommendation. Why would I take a recommendation from someone whose opinion I haven't had the opportunity to evaluate beforehand? Some reviews I read were bad. They were not reviews declaring the book to be bad (pretty much everyone recommended it) - the actual review itself was awful: badly spelled and/or ungrammatical. For example one of them misspelled the author's name even though it also sported a book cover image with the name right there on it.

Another didn't know the difference between pension and penchant (and the author probably isn’t even penitant!). I’m guessing that reviewer doesn’t know the difference between Eragon, Aragorn, and Aragog, either! Some were not accurate in describing what actually happens in the book. That sort of thing immediately makes me wonder if they even read the book they're recommending. I hope I don't do any of those things, or if I do, I soon catch them and fix them. Or my commenters embarrass me and make me fix ‘em!

One review was evidently written by someone whose second language is English; once I'd realized that, I actually found that one quite charming. She certainly had a better grasp of my language than I ever will of hers! Anyway, enough reviewing of reviews. Now I'm in a mood, so this review is going to have spoilers galore! Deal with it! Here's the first revelation: After reading Sapphire Blue (not to be confused with Sapphic Blue which I might actually write some day now that title came from nowhere into my head) I became convinced that Gwen's mother is actually not her real mother.

I think Gwen's actual parents are Paul and Lucy (in the past with chronographs!). There's a song in there somewhere! Can you believe it's half a century - literally - since the Beatles released their first number 1 single? Here we go:

Picture yourself in a time-travel novel
With green-eyed heroes, and young English girls
Somebody calls you, you answer in German
Es klang auf englisch rhythmischer

Taffeta dresses of yellow and green
Sticking a bustle behind
Look for the girl with the time-travel gene
And she's gone
[cue Ringo's triple drum beat]
Lucy in the pa-ast with chronographs (etc., etc.)

I know that young adults don't really have much of a handle on who the Beatles were, but this YA novel wasn't written by a young adult; it was written by someone who does indeed have a handle on the Beatles, especially since she's German herself and the Beatles came together as a real band whilst playing in Germany. But why Paul and Lucy? It was John who wrote Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds, not Ringo or Paul, by George! I digress (is digress the feminine form of the Australian term ‘digger’?).

So anyway, Sapphire Blue opens immediately at the end of Ruby Red. Gideon and Gwen have just kissed right on the bench in the church confessional (actually on the lips in the church confessional, for the more perverse of you) and the ghost gargoyle, who is also a demon as it happens, has spoken to Gwen, unbeknownst to Gideon. It's amusing to see Gwen try to conduct a conversation with the gargoyle (named Xemerius), whom Gideon cannot hear, whilst also trying to converse rather breathlessly with the latter, post first kiss.

The gargoyle attaches himself to Gwen, to which at first she objects, but later, she sees some advantage in this. Why she doesn't take much more advantage of the gargoyle's ability to fly to distant locations, eavesdrop invisibly, and report back, and of his ability to walk through walls and closed doors is a mystery. Note that Xemerius cannot travel through time with Gwen. This is intriguing since objects can: clothes, cell phones, weapons. It’s not your Terminator-style time-travel in the Ruby Red world! But try getting a cell-phone signal in 18th century London....

Now whether this reveals something of later importance with regard to the nature of ghosts or of time-travel, remains to be seen. It's also intrguing that since he's five hundred years old, or something like that, Xemerius actually existed in Gwen's travelable past, so it's possible she may meet him in vol 3 ‘in the living stone’ as it were! We also learn that Gideon is even more of a jerk in vol 2 than he was in vol 1. Talk about blowing hot and cold: Gideon just blows! Just as Gwen is the Ruby, Gid is the diamond and is as hard as one towards her, yet this fails, somehow, to throw a wet blanket on their relationship, which is funny because Xemerius feels to Gwen like he’s a wet blanket when he wraps himself around her....

Okay, trying to stay focused here. Gwen unaccountably (and literally) swoons for Gideon even more in this book than she did in the first, despite being treated worse by him. Are we supposed to learn from this that young girls should both expect and accept maltreatment? Given the news coming out of Pakistan and other Islamic nations of late, this would seem to be a lesson which has apparently been taken to heart there, but it isn't acceptable in any enlightened society, regardless of its prevailing religion or lack of same. I'm forced to wonder why Gier, herself a woman, would faciltiate it; I now feel she has her work cut out ahead of her in vol 3 to fix these injustices and I’ll be sorely disappointed if she fails!

Anyway, Gideon doesn't trust Gwen. This is supposed, I guess, to explain his insufferable behavior towards her, but after vol 2, I remain unconvinced that he's not one of the villains. No one trusts Gwen, actually; all of the super-secret society think she's a potential traitor to the cause having been brought (through no fault of her own, let's be clear) so belatedly into its clutches. Hence she's blindfolded before being taken down into the catacombs where the chronograph is kept locked away in a safe (safe ire blue anyone?) for her time-traveling forays. But have no fear: Xemerius can steer! He can follow the route and no doubt reveal it to Gwen later.

Xemerius is a welcome addition to the story. Normally, I dislike intensely these supposedly cute animals in fiction (and sometimes in fact!), but Xemerius is an exception. He’s not at all like that absurd monkey-like creature in 1998’s Lost in Space or like Bubo the demented mechanical owl in 1981’s Clash of the Titans. Yes, he's not an animal as such, but he's often described in Sapphire Blue as being similar to a cat in appearance or behaviorally, although Xemerius behaves more like a flying monkey, almost like something out of Wizard of Oz (maybe after the wizard gave it a heart). Despite being a demon, he's helpful, smart, and makes astute and often humorous observations throughout vol 2. It's worth reading it just for that experience.

What's conspicuously missing in vol 2 is any reference to the midwife who helped Gwen's mum forge her purported daughter's birth date. It seemed like the super-secret society couldn't put enough resources into play to track her down in vol 1, but nary a word is whispered about her in vol 2. She's disappeared; not only from the extensive clutches of the society, but from the very novel itself! This is one of the things which helped to convince me that the midwife is none other than Lucy, and Lucy is none other than Gwen's biological mum. I think Gier is playing Run Silent Run Deep on the midwife so she can reproduce her with a flourish and a big reveal in vol 3.

But that's just wild speculation. Since I neither speak nor read deutsch and have not seen vol 3 which is evidently already published in Germany, I have no inside information. On that front, why they're making us wait in the English-speaking world for vol 3 is as big of a mystery as what's going on in the super-secret society, or with the expected results of finally completing the magic circle. Nothing more of this is revealed in vol 2.

The big time-travel trips in vol 2 are to a soirée, to a meeting with the villainous count, and then to a ball a few days later, but whilst we see the soirée trip and Gwen is out for the count (more on these anon), we don’t actually get to the ball until, presumably, vol 3. I suspect this ball is the one where Gwen met herself in vol 1, and it’s held at James’ (the ghost) parents’ house which also happens to be the high school which Gwen attends in her own time.

As I mentioned before, there is some urgency in the soirée trip, but why this should be so isn't revealed. Gwen can time-travel, so she can just as easily attend the event in six months' time after extensive training, as she can in two days time with little or no preparation, yet she's forced to swot intensively under the oboxious tutelage of a guy whose an even greater jerk than is Gideon. As if that were not enough, this training takes place also under the contemptuous eye of her cousin Charlotte - and no one seems to think there's anything amiss with this insulting and abusive treatment, not even Gwen!

Actually, one review I read suggested that Charlotte's story would not only be a YA tale worthily told against the grain, but also an interesting story of itself. Another reviewer suggested that Lucy and Paul's story would be well worth the telling, and perhaps more interesting than Gwen's. I have to agree with both those views. I’m expecting to learn much more of the enigmatic rebel couple in vol 3 - much more! I suspect that, given the short shrift which Charlotte experiences at Gier’s hands in vol 2 (and if you've ever tried to wear a short shrift, you'll know how chilly it can be), we won't hear much more about her in vol 3 either.

Time-travelers in Ruby Red world have to ‘elapse’ - that is, spend regular, planned blocks of time in the past, or they will find themselves jumping back in time unpredictably, and perhaps with dire results. Gwen is typically sent to a safe period (usually in the 1950’s) where she has to sit and read or do her homework in the dark, dusty, dank and rat- and spider-infested basement of the super-secret society’s London HQ for a couple of hours.

In Sapphire Blue, on one such occasion, Gwen accidentally encounters one of her grandfathers, and strikes up (or in this case, since she knew him when she was a child, renews) her acquaintanceship with him. This is evidently another set-up for vol 3, since nothing comes of it in vol 2 after that initial meeting except that Gideon grows suspicious of Gwen when she comes back smelling of cigarettes. This leads to an unfortunate misunderstanding which puts a serious kink (and not of the fun kind) into their relationship.

Anyway, Gwen and Gid zip back to the soirée where they hook up with the Count. The Count’s sinister companion, whom I forgot to mention in my Ruby Red review because he’s so seemingly insignificant (and try saying that three times fast. OK, maybe it’s not so hard...) shows up again in Sapphire blue as an escourt. He’s also known as the Black Leopard. All these colors! I suspect he has an important rôle to play in vol 3. Actually this guy - who is evidently experimenting with absinthe (perhaps because he thinks it makes the heart grow fonder?) which gives him black, dead eyes - is called Rakoczy. This is interesting because there was a real Count Saint-Germain and his suspected father is Francis II Rákóczi (also spelled Rákóczy), a prince of Transylvania! You can look up these guys in wikipedia.

Gwen gets drunk at the soirée which dropped me right out of my suspended disbelief because it seemed so out of character for her. Maybe I misread her, or maybe she was driven to it by the treatment she’d had handed out to her, and by the stress of her circumstances. She ends up being pally with the selfsame Count who had threatened her with strangulation on their first encounter, and he’s pally with her - almost as affectionate as a grandfather. We learn that this is because of their amicable meeting the day before, which Gwen doesn’t make until the day after, Why that is, isn’t explained either, but it does help focus the attention on how whacky things can become when time-travel is an option.

Gwen sings a song from the Cats musical, accompanied by Gid on the piano and she falls even further in love with him. That is until she meets with the Count the next day (in her time and the day previous to the soirée in his). The Count is charming and treats her reasonably (if we ignore his appalling genderism!), but he reveals to Gwen that Gid is only being nice to her because the Count had instructed him to make her fall for him! Naturally Gwen’s nose is seriously put out of joint by this, and she refuses to speak more than a few words to Gid when she returns, especially having discovered that he had spent his time cooking a meal for Charlotte whilst she was tripping back in time!

So there is all manner of disaster, pitfall, mystery and problems lying in wait for Emerald Green, the concluding volume of this trilogy, which I shall review in the autumn when it’s released in English.

Ruby Red by Kerstin Gier

Title: Ruby Red
Author: Kerstin Gier
English language publisher: Macmillan
Rating: WORTHY!

Ruby Red was originally published in 2009 in German as Rubinrot with the subtitle which is evidently common to each book in the trilogy: liebe geht durch alle zeiten (love goes through all times). This is book 1 in the Ruby Red trilogy (also know as the Edelstein trilogy) and is followed by Sapphire Blue (published in German as Saphirblau in 2010, and in English in 2011), and Emerald Green (published in German as Smaragdgrün in 2010, and in English in 2013)

The English language translator is Anthea Bell. I detest book trailers, but for those interested, there's one here (German with English subtitles), with a movie tie-in (in German) here. Note that Gwen's name is Gwendolyn in the German original.

A 16-year-old English girl, Gwyneth, also known as Gwenny or Gwen tells this story. She's living in wealthy circumstances in London, but under the shadow of her supercilious cousin Charlotte, who is imminently expecting to be time-traveling both because of a rare gene and of her particular age (which is the same as Gwen's, don't you know?

Out of the blue (or out of the ruby red, if you prefer!), Gwen accidentally discovers that it is she and not Charlotte who has this gene. She subsequently learns that she's now expected to fulfill her cousin's destiny: a role which for which Charlotte had been extensively trained and educated all her life (and doesn't everyone know it‽), but for which Gwen is entirely unprepared.

This lack of preparation derives from the fact that Gwen's own mother deliberately concealed the truth from everyone about Gwen's candidacy for time-travel and it's exacerbated by the fact that, even after Gwen's true nature is revealed, no one, not even her own mother, is willing to tell her anything useful about what's going on or what's really expected of her. I have a theory about this, which I'll reveal in my review of Sapphire Blue.

So Gwen gets to travel in time with Gorgeous Gideon, meet an evil count, and learn about the dastardly duo who stole the original chronograph (which is the flux capacitor of the Ruby Red world - it's what makes controlled time-travel possible!). More on that duo in the review of Sapphire Blue.

Detailed plot (stop reading here if you don't want any spoilers!):
As the story begins, Gwen is in high school with her kick-A best friend Lesley Hay (No word on whether her middle name is Whatthe). It's an ordinary day (if you discount the fact that Gwen is on first-name speaking terms with the school ghost, James, which no one but she can see) except that Gwen feels rather queasy, and then she has to leave early to take her cousin home. Her cousin doesn't feel well either, and this appears to be presaging Charlotte's first anticipated time jump, so taking her home in order for her to be conveyed to a safe place to jump is important.

That taken care of, Gwen is sent on an errand to Selfridge's to buy some sherbet lemon candies (shades of McGonagle opening the entrance to Dumbledore's office!) Unfortunately, right at the end of chapter 2, Gwen finds herself unexpectedly and entirely inconveniently flipping back into the past.

Rather than tell anyone (except for Lesley with whom she shares everything), Gwen keeps mum and doesn't tell mum. Why? No explanation! Shades of Harry Potter again. So Gwen ends up flipping back in time three times before she finally 'fesses up to her mother. On the second of these trips she sees herself with a guy whom her other self kisses in order to distract attention from the time-stamped version of Gwen who is hiding.

Everyone but her mother (and Lesley) is either disbelieving, dismissive, or derogatory about Gwen's ability, but Gwen is hastily taken by mum to the HQ of a super-secret society which is trying to plumb the mystery of what will happen when the circle of the time-traveling twelve, which Gwen now completes, is closed and their blood samples entered into the chronograph.

We learn that the chronograph is a duplicate - the original having been stolen by a romantic pair of runaways, Paul and Lucy (Beatles reference anyone?!) who are acting in opposition to the society for reasons unknown and currently hiding somewhere in time. More about those two in my review of Vol 2.

This is where Gwen meets Gideon, a member of a rival time-traveling family which dominates the society. He's a de Villiers, Gwen is (ancestrally) a Montrose and never the twain should meet! So of course, they do. The society bigwigs don't believe Gwen or her mother at first and they're determined to track down the midwife who helped Gwen's mom to forge the date on Gwen's birth certificate to find out exactly what's going on and why Gwen's time-travel potential was hidden. More on that very midwife in my review of Vol 2!

The time-traveling twelve have all had their dates of birth calculated, with a certain amount of gravity, by none other than Sir Isaac Newton, no doubt on his apple computer.... It was this forgery which disguised Gwen's potential for time-travel. However, they eventually accept that Gwen is a time-traveler and they want to send her back to visit the Comte De Saint Germain (a real person historically), 200 or so years in the past. He's evidently the time-traveler overlord (no that's not the same as a time lord!).

Gwen's mother flatly does not want Gwen to meet him, but rendered into a distinctly contrary frame of mind by all the secretiveness and everyone's snotty attitudes, Gwen resolves to go. Dressed in authentic period costume created by the society's French seamstress who bears an Italian name, and accompanied, of course, by Gideon, Gwen meets the count. She sees only an old man and wonders why her mother was so scared of him; however, shortly before they travel back, the count grabs her by the throat and threatens her, unknown to the others in the room - and he's standing several feet away from her at the time, not even touching her physically! Creepy!

On the way back from that visit, the duo discover that their carriage has taken a wrong direction, and when they stop the driver, they're set upon by three sword-wielding and pistol-toting men whom Gideon fights off, assisted by Gwen, who stabs one of them, thereby enabling Gideon to dispatch the last of them and for the time-travelers to escape to a nearby church where they await being whisked back to their present. It's whilst they're in the church that Gideon kisses Gwen. And the ghost of a gargoyle talks to her. And then we have to wait for book 2 before we can learn what happens next!

I happened upon this book in the library because it had been put on prominent display on top of one of the stacks. The bright red cover, and the title, caught my eye initially. Being a lover of time-travel stories I was drawn to it and I found myself intrigued by the plot and amused by a brief perusal inside. Once I began reading, I became quite engaged and sped through it quickly; then I had to wait until Xmas to get the second volume. At that time, I bought both volumes in hardback, having decided that this would be a keeper which (hopefully) my children would read in time.

This is how I was able to read volumes one (for the second time) and two for the first time, back-to-back which made for a fun read and took almost no time at all to get through. If you're planning on embarking upon this trilogy, and you have iron willpower, I'd recommend waiting until autumn of 2013 when the final volume is supposed to be released in English; then buy or borrow all three of them at once; in that way you can plunge recklessly through them one after another and have a whale of a time-travel.

If you like this kind of a story, you won't regret that, since volume two continues precisely where Vol 1 left off and Vol 3 promises to do the same. They could have been written as one book since neither of the first two volumes is self-contained; they both have cliffhangers which may well leave you frustrated if you can't dive into this with all your books in a row!

So what's right with these novels? They have a light tone and make for an easy read, although some may complain they're devoured too quickly or they're insubstantial. The main character, Gwyneth, (called Gwendolyn in the German original) is charming, if a bit lacking in self-possession. She's a decent person, fun and friendly, and not at all mean like her cousin. She steps up to the challenge of time-traveling when she has to, despite being kept in the dark and lacking in preparation; all-in-all, a pretty decent protagonist, although at times a bit annoying.

The time-traveling portions are engaging, if a little frustrating, and they do build some mystery - certainly much more of a mystery than in figuring out what's likely to go down between Gwen and Gideon. Gee! Or double gee! So tight-lipped are the characters about what's going on, you may find yourself wondering if Gier isn't channeling Rowling's Harry Potter series with all the secrets and evident revelations being held back for a future volume, but it's as frustrating as it is disheartening to see people doing plainly dumb things for no other purpose than spreading a plot.

I don't know any 16-year-old English girls, so it may be that Gier has a better handle on them than I do, but I had to wonder about some of Gwen's conduct and behaviors. While I think that she would be a fun person to know and to spend short periods of time with, especially discussing novels and movies, for me she seems a bit shallow and limited at times and she's given to digging unfortunate holes for herself. OTOH, she probably wouldn't be head-over-heels about me either!

It was painfully obvious, of course, under the 'opposites attract trope' of giddy romance novels, that she would end falling for Gideon, the leading male protagonist (or antagonist - I have yet to read Vol 3!), but I found myself being dropped unceremoniously out of my suspension of disbelief into wondering why she puts up with him after reading Vol 1 and especially after Vol 2: he's downright unpleasant if not manic depressive, yet Gwen almost literally swoons over him. Seriously?

It's the 21st century. Must we continue to mislead our young women into thinking that they have to put up with what is nothing short of mental abuse from a partner? Do smart women really want that, even at sixteen? Is it necessary for her to enslave herself to his passive aggression? It's not a stretch to see Gideon's behavior as cynically taking advantage of a rather rudderless younger girl who already has been deprived of defenses because of her blinkered upbringing, or had those defenses weakened by her recent circumstances. There is some confirmation that this isn't solely my imagination, in Vol 2.

For all I know, her relationship with Gideon may well be the norm for the English (or German?) mid-teen girls. I hope it's not, because the relationship was sadly lacking in substance to my mind. She wasn't drawn to him in any way as a real person; quite the opposite in fact: she was often repelled by his character traits, but was helplessly and consistently drawn to his unnaturally good looks. That's pretty shallow. Would it honestly be too much to ask for a story where the protagonist was perfectly ordinary and average in their looks, but who won the attention and devotion of their partner because they were a really fun, interesting, and truly warm person?!

Enough said about that. Just be aware of where this novel is coming from with regard to some of its roots, and then you can try to ignore that and enjoy it for its other qualities! Not that good science is one of those: I found myself a bit depressed that once again we have a writer who posits an 'X' gene where X is the ability to do something wonderful for its owner which the genomes of others fail to offer them.

We see in TV shows like Heroes and Alphas that there is a magic gene that conveys powers. In Ruby Red, it's the time-travel gene. The sad fact is that (aside from any rational issues about how it's supposed to work!) a single gene rarely does anything special by itself. Yes, there are instances in nature of a single gene being responsible for something significant, but the norm is that it's a gene network, consisting of protein coding genes and regulatory genes which actually do the really important work, so if Gier had mentioned a gene network, or a gene complex rather than a single gene, I wouldn't have had to roll my eyes quite so energetically! But that's just me.

I also had some issues with the time-travel, but these are not confined to Gier's novels; they're common to all-too-many time-travel stories. For example, in Gier's story, Gwyneth is often told that something has to be hurried along. In Vol 2, we learn that there's no time to properly train Gwen because she has to attend a soirée (in the past) two days hence! Hello! She's a time-traveler! She could train for another ten years and still go back to that same date and attend that same soirée! That's what the chronograph does! Maybe there are actually valid reasons why it can't be put off, but it appears we readers can't be trusted with the knowledge of what those are.

On the positive side, it was interesting that Gier didn't set some of the usual limits on what could be done. Yes, there was only so far back into history that they can travel (four or five hundred years - we don't learn why), and they can only be gone for two or three hours before being pulled back (why and by what is not explained), but they can control exactly when and where they go, and for how long they stay (within those limits). And meeting yourself in the past is not forbidden! Gier actually puts this to good use in the first volume but by the end of the second we still haven't seen that same scene from the other perspective.

It may well be that the third volume neatly ties all the loose ends up, but as of the end of Vol 2, there is a heck of a pile of unanswered questions, and a lot of things which make too little sense. Having said that, I'm still interest in reading Vol 3. Maybe that's the power of writing a series as opposed to single, stand-alone novels - once you get your audience hooked, you have ready-made captives, and so you can get away with a lot more than you could by having only stand-alone titles out there. Not that his did David Weber any good with me with his Honor Harrington series, but therein lies another review!

One final gripe - we have already the technology to sequence the genome, and in Ruby Red, they have blood samples from at least eight of the twelve they need to close the circle. Clearly the secret society is rolling in wealth, yet somehow they were unable to divine that Charlotte was not the gene carrier? Hmm!

Okay, enough sniping. If you're interested in young adult sci-fi and time-travel, and perky girls and fun adventures, then you should like this series. As I said, despite some issues and reservations, I'm on-board enough with Gier's characters, mysteries, and story-telling that I'm looking forward to the third volume.

She also has other novels out there, including one titled Männer und andere Katastrophen (Men and Other Disasters) which sounds like a riot (although not necessarily YA), so I may check out some of those, too, as funds, time, and English translations permit, which they rarely do!