In fin-de-siecle Copenhagen, part-time prostitute Charlotte and her lumpen sidekick, Fru Schleswig, have taken on jobs as cleaning ladies of dubious talent to tide them over the harsh winter of 1897. But the home of their neurotic new employer, the widow Krak, soon reveals itself to be riddled with dark secrets - including the existence of a demonic machine rumoured to swallow people alive. Rudely catapulted into twenty-first-century London, the hapless duo discover a whole new world of glass, labour-saving devices and hectic, impossible romance.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
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. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
'Unashamedly gleeful: a kind of topsy-turvy Jane Eyre with added time travel ... Sit back, suspend your disbelief, and enjoy' Daily Mail 'Less science fiction than fairy tale, it is also a love story, complete with many dramatic reversals of fortune and narrated in appealingly breathless, energetic style ... Jensen is a consistently inventive writer' Sunday Telegraph 'This sweetly entertaining story is enough on the magical side of realism to allow love, for once, to conquer all' Sunday Times 'Captivating ... There are moments of genius ... Packed with charm and energy, this is definitely worth taking the, er, time to read' Time Out
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fiction? certainly; science fiction? well . . .,
By Jevons & Hollerith Books (Columbia, MD USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time: A Novel (Hardcover)
Best to start by quoting a paragraph from the Paul Di Filippo review of Liz Jensen works in the July 2007 issue of "Asimov's Science Fiction" magazine:
"Jensen is not marketed as a genre author, nor reviewed in genre venues. And she doesn't exactly rate big coverage from mainstream, establishment publications, either--a result, I believe, of her slipstream nature, and her consequent falling in between two camps. And she's British, which, sadly, often militates against a wider audience in the USA. (I suspect, based on the praise-filled British blurbs for her books, that she's got a much higher profile in her native land.) These factors make it unlikely that Asimov readers will have a deep familiarity with her work. And that's a darn shame, given her superb prose, witty fantastical conceits, narrative drive, and mature sophistication." Based on this suggestion from a knowledgeable source, I tried Dirty Little Secrets -- her latest work -- and liked it enough to hunt up copies of Egg Dancing (1995), Ark Baby (1998), The Paper Eater (2000), War Crimes for the Home (2002), and The Ninth Life of Louis Drax (2004). Is it science fiction? fantasy? something else entirely? Your guess is as good as Filippo's; who cares -- a marzipan storyteller.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Witty and wonderful,
By cordeliaknits (Berkeley, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time: A Novel (Hardcover)
I loved this book! It was witty, smart, sometimes silly, and suspenseful. It was like an engaging children's book for adults. If you are looking for a book that will keep you interested and smiling throughout, I reccommend it highly.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A cheerfully-bawdy romantic time-travel fantasy: 4.6 stars,
By
This review is from: My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time: A Novel (Hardcover)
This is a cheerfully-bawdy romantic time-travel fantasy, set in 19th-century Copenhagen and 21st-century London. The time-travel device (in both senses) is cartoonish (but fun). Jensen writes well and has done her homework. The protagonist is a hooker with a heart of gold (OK, gilt), which shows once again that a good writer can recycle the hoariest cliche into Good Stuff. Fluff, but *good* fluff.
Happy reading, Peter D. Tillman
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