Tunneling: A Novel [Hardcover]

Beth Bosworth (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 22, 2003

Rachel Finch is twelve years old and in love—not with a neighborhood boy, but with the Dewey decimal system, call numbers and the cellophane covers of library books . . . also with time travel, a superhero she knows only as S-Man and, above all, Franz Kafka. She considers herself a very different young girl—until she makes the acquaintance of a classmate who challenges that sense of otherness.

In this utterly inventive debut novel, we are irresistibly drawn into a world where Rachel, who many years later narrates our story, has begun to lead a double life. Severely asthmatic and deemed bookish and delicate by her family, she takes clandestine time-bending excursions with S-Man to rescue some of history’s greatest literary geniuses. Swooping in on Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and Chinua Achebe, among others, Rachel’s rescue missions are a rollicking ride through literary history, while her day-to-day life in Teaneck, New Jersey, emotively reflects the civil rights movement in 1960s America.

Writing with a confidence, intelligence and playfulness rare for a first-time novelist, Beth Bosworth has given us a book brimming with magical realism and boundless imagination, in which literary references, great humor and political consciousness fully blossom into a significance far beyond the grasp of a twelve-year-old girl. Witty and wise, with deftly rendered shadings of the heart, Tunneling is at once boldly fanciful and remarkably down-to-earth.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Bosworth's intriguing but uneven debut novel (after the collection A Burden of Earth) starts off with a bang. Due to her superior reading skills, Rachel E. Finch, an asthmatic seventh grader growing up in late 1960s Teaneck, N.J., has been chosen by S-Man, a blue-haired superhero, "to fly to the aid of troubled writers!" Zipping through time with the cape-wearing ("Holy Mother Planet!") S-Man, the adolescent bookworm helps Shakespeare through writer's block, has amazingly erudite encounters with Oscar Wilde, Chinua Achebe, Madame de Pompadour, Aquaman and others, while also battling evil-doers like stinky Malathion, the impish Mr. Stick, arch villain Laff Riot and the brain-sucking Assemblage. It beats real time, where Rachel's parents' marriage is coming apart, her older and more popular sister, Elaine, drives her crazy and racial tensions play out in a city where Malathion insecticide sprays drive citizens into their homes to avoid contamination. Rachel's adventures with S-Man are the precocious 12-year-old's primary coping mechanism; her other consolation is her friendship with fellow book fiend ("You can't not read everybody") Rachel Fish. Lyrical and amusing at its best, the novel is marred by coy authorial intrusions, and the explosive fantasy-meets-reality conclusion is oddly dissatisfying. But Bosworth can be gloriously inventive, and her fantastical coming-of-age novel should prove a treat for superhero-loving bibliophiles.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School-As the '60s turn into the '70s, seventh-grader Rachel Finch lives in Teaneck, NJ-most of the time. She also spends part of her waking hours exploring literary scenes of the past, under the guidance of S-Man, a morphed character blending Shakespeare and Superman to a delightful and witty result. The girl really wants to meet Kafka, but S-Man instead transports her to the age of Voltaire, to the day of Socrates's capital sentence, and to the threatened village inhabited by Chinua Achebe's wife and children. When not on the fanciful literary road, Rachel battles asthma, her older sister's smugness, and popularity roulette at school. Bosworth manages to fold together time travel, literary and intellectual history, political insights appropriate to a very bright 12-year-old, and a scary climax featuring a crazed Vietnam War vet and his minions of bullying boys. Both historical and fictional characters are vital and fully formed, spinning out so much energy that readers fairly bounce along from era to era and crisis to solution. The big questions of good and evil, race consciousness, family dynamics, and mortality all get their due without the whole ride derailing. Rachel is a worthy successor to the bright, young protagonist of Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World (Farrar, 1994). Teens looking for an intellectual challenge with a twist of culture will be charmed.
Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Shaye Areheart Books; 1st edition (July 22, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0609611038
• ISBN-13: 978-0609611036
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,474,162 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars better idea than execution, November 13, 2003

By 

B. Capossere (Rochester, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tunneling: A Novel (Hardcover)

Rachel Finch is a dual-level time traveler. In half the book, she travels through time in the normal fashion of a coming-of-age story. In another part of the book she literally (and literarily) travels in time with "S-Man" on "rescue missions" to writers as Shakespeare, Wilde, Voltaire, among others. Though the dangers are more obvious in her travels to other times and places, anyone who has experienced middle and high school won't be surprised to find that those journeys are equally perilous.
The book starts off with one of the best openings I've read in a while. Unfortunately, it gradually loses its promise. The set fantasy pieces read great in outline/sketch form (save Shakespeare from writer's block by inspiring The Tempest, see what happens when Voltaire and Rousseau are forced to share the cramped confines of a wardrobe, etc.) but on the full page they never quite satisfy, almost as if most of the energy came in the brainstorming, leaving the author a bit too tired to put it into the actual writing. The scenes' brevity exacerbates the problem because you seldom get to see the historical figures as doing more than quickly playing their parts as historical figures. Because they don't come across as fully fleshed people, both the characters and our meetings with them fall flat. The same is true of S-Man--a character crying out for more time and substance. Well-read readers will enjoy the literary jokes and will like seeing familiar faces in somewhat unfamiliar settings, but it is more the small sense of enjoyment one gets at the mall by seeing an acquaintance going up the escalator while you go down than that of seeing a good friend in a pub window and popping in to share a glass and some laughs.
Bosworth does a better job with the real-time scenes, strongly conveying the depth and range of emotions that play out during those early and middle teen years. Layered on top of the typical adolescent angst and family problems are issues of civil rights and the environment, both of which are smoothly integrated into the storylines.
Weaving back and forth between Rachel's dual lives (stopping now and then for some unnecessary and detracting authorial intrusions), Bosworth brings both plotlines crashing (again, literally) together in an ending that came across as forced and that once again seemed to fall flat in comparison to its potential.
One running problem I had with the novel is that I too often felt bounced about between not just scenes but actual lines, almost as if someone had somehow stolen my copy and whited out transitional dialogue or internal monologue or even full scenes. It is rare that I have the feeling as I'm reading that I don't know why people are doing what they are doing or saying what they are saying, but I felt that in multiple scenes in this book. I'm sure this "bounced around" feeling also contributed to the lack of emotive impact of many of the novel's scenes.
Looking back on the book, the weakest parts by far were the time-travel sections, but while the real-time scenes were better, they were not good enough to carry this as simply a regular coming-of-age novel, perhaps partly because scenes that could carry more weight--both in terms of plot and character/plot development were sacrificed to the time-travel scenes. And it is the time-traveling literary aspect of the book that piqued my curiosity in the first place and which so excited me as a reading prospect--I would have hated to have had someone tell Bosworth early on to simply drop them and write your everyday coming-of-age text. Instead, I think she needed someone to say--"great idea, but can you keep working on it?" Maybe it was just too ambitous a project for a debut novel. I'd love to see it again ten years from now after she writes another novel or three and then takes this one out of the drawer again. But in this version, I can't recommend it.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, September 16, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Tunneling: A Novel (Hardcover)

Beth Bosworth juxtaposes vividly imaged fantasy and hyper-reality in this story of a world hovering between destruction and fragile salvation. Rachel Finch, a twelve year old booklover, joins forces with superhero S-man to save literary history. In between her travels through time and space, Rachel must cope with growing up in 1960's New Jersey, where her family and "model town" are coming apart at the seams.

The fantasy portions of this book are so well rendered that they have the pure ring of myth, and Rachel's everyday reality is evoked with all the harrowing immediacy of childhood in an era of environmental threat and social change. Moving back and forth between these two worlds, the story builds steadily toward a spectacular climax in which they collide, quite literally raising the roof.

Give this one a try!