Tanglewreck [Hardcover]

Jeanette Winterson (Author)

Book Description

Age Level: 8 and up | Grade Level: 3 and up

Something frightening is happening with time. One moment, a time tornado rages through the streets of London, and those caught up in its path vanish without a trace. The next moment a woolly mammoth is seen lumbering along the banks of the River Thames. At the center of these bizarre time warps is a house called Tanglewreck, which is home to eleven-year-old Silver, her bony and bad-tempered aunt, Mrs Rokabye, and a mysterious clock known as the Timekeeper. Silver doesn't understand exactly what the Timekeeper does, but when two sinister figures come looking for it, she knows instinctively that she must guard it with her life.

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Grade 6-10–A Time Tornado drops ancient horsemen and chariots into present-day London and causes a busload of school children to disappear into thin air. A mysterious, self-proclaimed scientist known as Regalia Mason secretly seeks to profit from this event and other disturbances so that she can harvest spare time and sell it through her company. Meanwhile, a sinister alchemist named Abel Darkwater seeks a clock known as the Timekeeper in order to become even more powerful than Mason. At the center of this struggle is an orphan named Silver and her 500-year-old house, Tanglewreck, where she lives with her aunt as the prophesied Keeper of the Clock. She embarks on a prophecy-fulfilling interstellar journey to locate the Timekeeper and guarantee the safety of time as we know it. Winterson masterfully weaves together an imaginative array of settings and characters to bring the story to its exhilarating fulfillment. Silver's varied relationships add even more depth, encapsulating family, friendship, deceit, and abuse. Some explanations of futuristic technology, concepts of time and space, and even humor will likely be too challenging for most children younger than the book's 11-year-old protagonist, but this time-bending sci-fi adventure will be a fine addition to young adult collections.–Emily Rodriguez, Alachua County Library District, Gainesville, FL
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Time has become unpredictable; "time tornadoes" are picking up school buses and depositing wooly mammoths on the banks of the Thames. Eleven-year-old Silver lives in a sprawling manse, Tanglewreck, with her greedy guardian. One day evil Abel Darkwater visits Tanglewreck in search of a timekeeper that he insists belonged to Silver's father, who, with his wife and other daughter, has disappeared. Silver has no idea what he's talking about, but Darkwater isn't convinced. He imprisons her in his clock-filled London home, where he plans to keep her until she tells him what he wants to know. She's rescued by Gabriel, a strange boy from a clan that has made its home beneath London for more than a century. Together, Silver and Gabriel search for the timekeeper and foil the villain. Winterson seamlessly combines rousing adventure with time warps, quantum physics, and a few wonderfully hapless flunkies. Her clever science will draw fans of Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, and her dastardly villains and resourceful youngsters will remind readers of Lemony Snicket's books about the hapless Baudelaires. Diana Herald
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 8 and up
  
• Hardcover: 414 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Childrens (June 27, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582349193
• ISBN-13: 978-1582349190
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,299,490 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A minute on earth is not the same...., July 5, 2006

By 

Karusichan "Karusichan" (Lansing, MI. USA.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tanglewreck (Hardcover)

Silver is a young red haired, green-eyed eleven year old living in a vast house that dates back to the 1500's. Her parents and her sister, Buddleia, have been dead (or as Silver believes it missing) for four years. This means that Silver has to be taken care of by her Aunt Mrs. Rokabye, a woman who looks after her own interests. One day a man named Abel Darkwater comes into their lives, searching for an item called the timekeeper. Whatever this device does Silver is unaware, but it is plain that Darkwater wants it and will do anything to get it.

After a trip to London and bizarre occurrences with Darkwater forces Silver to flee she is aided by a young man, more precisely a young man belonging to a race of underground dwelling people called the Throwbacks. As Silver stays with them she learns they were once all patients at an asylum called Bedlam where Darkwater performed nefarious experiments on them. Into the mix is also mentioned a woman named Maria Prophetessa , who has an unusual connection to a woman named Regalia Mason, an executive at a corporation called Quanta, who has succeeded in the manufacturing of extracting time from people who have far too much of it and the selling it off to people who have too little. Also on Silver's trail is a couple of questionable men named Thugger and Fisty, who also seem as if they are interested in the fabled timekeeper.

Silver and Gabriel, the throwback, are now in a race with all of these people to find the legendary timekeeper. Unaware that Mrs. Rokabye has managed to acquire a piece of it from Silver's duffel bag they set of on a quest to secure the device, skirting Time Tornadoes, one-dimensional travel, black holes, starvation, and temptation from those who are their friends to ally themselves to the dark side. But can Silver and Gabriel succeed in their endeavors and manage to save all existence as they know it?

Sound confusing? In a way it is. The plot is fairly straight forward. Girl discovers an evil force threatening mankind, girl finds out she can stop evil force, girl meets boy, girl likes boy, girl must avoid questionable dark forces trying to cause harm, etc. etc. Fairly typical plot development for a fantasy book. Where it takes a turn from typical to confusing is in the method in which Winterson delivers the ideas and the way she crafts the story. For one thing she develops these short chapters, many only 5 to 10 pages long that are broken up into these random short paragraphs that make up different plot developments in the story. For instance, one paragraph may be only 6 sentences long, the sentences only containing 6 or 7 words each, then there is a break and the story either switches to something completely different (and usually right back) or it will continue with the story from the same paragraph just with a break for emphasis. What this technique does is it breaks up the story into this very frenetic telling of a story, like a movie does, or as if the story was dissolving into fragments before our eyes. Now, one can follow the story from the various angles, but it makes it a little confusing to the reader. My concern is that I am an adult reading this story and it is geared at children from 8 to 12? Will a child be able to follow this type of narrative? This may have to do with the fact that this is a typical literary device of Winterson's, except for the fact that this book is two to three times longer than her average books, so the style seems distinctly more rambling than usual.

Now, I have been a Winterson fan for a while now, so much so I feel as if I would be on a first name basis with her were we ever to meet. I adore her wit, her use of classic literature and metaphors, her dialogue and lexicon, and the simply superb style in which she translates her thoughts to a language in which the reader can understand. Her themes are generally straight forward and deal with a variety of science, philosophy, and love. When I saw she had written a children's sci-fi I was excited, and a little leery, in tandem. Winterson usually writes these incredibly poignant books of love, loss, and heartache... nine times out of ten about love between two women because she is an out lesbian (as I am). I wondered if she would exert her politics about her sexuality into this book and how that would come out in a child's book? I am happy and sad to say that she has not. There is not one glimmer of that essence of Winterson in this piece, in fact the slight bit of attraction there is in the book is between a female human and a male Throwback (interesting that it is an outcast, though) and it is mild and innocuous at best. One the one hand I am happy about this, because it means that any bigoted parents will let their child read this book (many religious folk may still have an issue with all of the "magic" , ie, "satanic" elements found in sci-fi... although the magic elements most people associate with science fiction are completely absent from this story, I can still see narrow minded people steering their children clear of it simply because of the genre more than anything). Now, I did say that the absense of her sexuality makes me sad too. While this lack makes it an appropriate read for that age bracket it of course makes me sad that Winterson has not in some small way written something about it for children to let them know that it is ok to be gay. Perhaps in the future, this is a science fiction story after all.

I have really mixed feelings about this book, however, that make it hard for me to say concretely that I loved or hated it. There are parts that are so wonderfully engaging I found myself devouring the text. However, there are parts that are so confusing I found myself distracted and not absorbing the story at all. Now, I tend to have a hard time reading books with a time theme to it (A wrinkle in time, for example, was difficult for me), so it may have been just the theme bothering me. Also, this may not have been my best week to read this as I have been overall distracted as of late, and should probably sit down with this a second time. It's one of those that warrants a second reading to tie up all the loose ends that are peppered throughout the story... but as a first attempt into a genre Winterson usually does not delve into it is a solid B, at best. I would have like to see her make it less frenetic, but perhaps that was the only way she could reign in her unique style to accommodate the age of the intended audience.

"The river Thames at Limehouse bows away from the City. The river glitters darkly. The river reflects the starless London sky. The river flows on to the sea. The river flows in one direction, but Time does not. Time's river carries our spent days out to sea and sometimes those days come back to us, changed, strange, but still ours. Time's flow is not even, and there are snags underwater, hesitations in Time where the clock sticks. A minute on Earth is not the same as a minute on Jupiter. A minute on Earth is sometimes a different length all by itself. "

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I wanted this to be brilliant, October 21, 2006

By 

Erin Kissane (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tanglewreck (Hardcover)

Tanglewreck seemed like a perfect combination of two of my great loves -- Jeanette Winterson's work and children's books -- until I actually read it. Silver's a wonderful heroine, and the plot had heaps of potential, but Winterson seems to have entered a new genre without bothering to learn much about the way children's books work. Winterson seems to be writing for children from a great distance, as though her own early childhood isn't quite real to her; it doesn't work. Her settings never came to life and after the first quarter of the book, the tone became increasingly sentimental and condescending...a fatal flaw in a book written for children.

Those seeking compelling, multilayered fiction for children would do better to try THE GOLDEN COMPASS (Philip Pullman) or the less famous but completely delightful FLY BY NIGHT (Frances Hardinge). Winterson fans who'd like to read luminous, literary prose applied to fantasy-genre tropes could do no better than to try LUD IN THE MIST, by Hope Mirrlees (a contemporary and acquaintance of Virginia Woolf).

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Courtesy of Teens Read Too, February 11, 2007

By 

TeensReadToo "Eat. Drink. Read. Be Merrier." (All Over the US & Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tanglewreck (Hardcover)

Time is not behaving itself. Trains stall in time, then rush ahead as if to catch up, pyramids appear in London, a school bus gets sucked into a Time Tornado and vanishes, and there have been woolly mammoth sightings in the park. Most people can't make any sense of it, and it's getting worse. And the people who do understand it, well, they might be the most dangerous of all.

Silver is an eleven-year-old orphan, alone in the world. Well, not completely alone. She has Mrs. Rockabye, the aunt who mysteriously appeared after the death (or maybe disappearance) of Silver's family. Silver thinks that she'd rather be alone than with Mrs. Rockabye, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen any time soon. For now Silver's greatest comfort is her house, Tanglewreck. It comforts her, soothes her, and even speaks to her. She knows about the strangeness of time, but as long as she can stay at Tanglewreck, she doesn't seem to be too concerned.

Abel Darkwater knows about time, and he understands why it's behaving strangely. Abel is sure that time can be controlled, and that whoever controls time will control the universe. Abel intends to be that person. He's sure that all he needs is the Timekeeper. And he's positive that Silver knows where it is. After all, Silver's dad was bringing it to Abel on the day the family died.

Silver is in a race against time, literally, to keep the Timekeeper safe. If only she knew where it was. Or what it was. With the help of her strange, new, old friend, Gabriel, Silver will have to travel to unknown places and times on a quest for something she's never seen.

I've always loved time travel stories, and this one is no exception. This is the first story I've read that has dealt with the actual alteration of time as opposed to the adjustments of the main character inside a particular time. Although that's in here, too. And, I have to say that this is the closest I've ever come to understanding Quantum Theory. (Something I'm sure would be very disappointing to all of the science teachers I've ever had.) Don't let that intimidate you though. Previous knowledge is (obviously) not required. Whether or not you come away with an understanding of that is not really even the point, though a nice side benefit. The point is that this is a very good, interesting, and well-written story. Plain and simple. You should read it.

Reviewed by: Carrie Spellman