PaperQuake: A Puzzle (Time Travel Mystery Series)

by Kathryn Reiss

Overview

Violet's paralyzing fear of the San Francisco earthquakes changes when her family renovates an old building. An aftershock dislodges a letter addressed in 1906 to Baby V—and Violet is certain the disturbing letter is intended for her.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780152167820
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/01/2002
Series:	Time Travel Mystery Series
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	4.50(w) x 7.00(h) x (d)
Lexile:	700L (what's this?)
Age Range:	10 - 14 Years

About the Author

KATHRYN REISS is the author of Time Windows, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults; The Glass House People; Dreadful Sorry; Pale Phoenix, a finalist for the Edgar Award; as well as PaperQuake: A Puzzle. A master of the time-travel mystery genre, “Reiss slips between past and present with a callous alacrity that is wondrously effective” (Kirkus Reviews). She lives with her family in Northern California. www.midgard.com/KReiss/KReissInfo.html

Editorial Reviews

"An adroit fusion of magic, romance and adventure."—Publishers Weekly
"[An] absorbing page-turner."—Kirkus Reviews
"A clever and skillfully written mystery."—The Horn Book
—

From the Publisher

Violet, Rose, and Jasmine Jackstone are triplets, but only beautiful and popular Rose and Jasmine are identical. Violet is the odd one out; she looks quite different and was, for a long time, very frail. She also has a passionate fear of earthquakes and suffers visions of children crying for help whenever there's an earthquake in the San Francisco Bay area, where they live. As the triplets help their parents in readying a new store for their pros-perous florist chain, Violet begins to find mysterious letters and messages, obviously written in the past, which seem to refer to her and incidents in her life. They also present a historical puzzle, seeming to hint at a murder and involvement in the great 1906 earthquake and fire. As Violet pursues this riddle, gaining self-confidence, she begins to engage her sisters' interest and respect, loses her fear of dying young, and even meets a boy she likes. The two themes of adventure and family relationships are deftly woven into the historical drama, and heightened by an atmospheric sense of place. Although credibility is begged here and there, this is a clever and skillfully written mystery.

Horn Book Magazine

A modern California teenager finds letters and diary pages from the early years of this century in this gripping, emotionally turbulent story from the author of Dreadful Sorry (1993). Violet, the non-identical member in a set of triplets, has had heart problems since birth, but is nevertheless tired of being babied by her sisters and parents. Helping to restore an old San Francisco house, she finds love letters from "Hal" to "V" and a 1906 diary, kept in the back of old ledgers, in which V's nurse, Laela, describes caring for her chronically ill charge and professes her own hidden love for Hal. Oddly, the more Violet learns about V's life, the more her own seems to move in parallel; even more distressingly, as a series of small earthquakes rock the area, Violet begins having visions and dreams of children caught in a fiery disaster. Both V and Laela had visions too, of disaster on a great bridge, and as more pages of the diary fall into Violet's hands, she becomes convinced that she's being sent a warning. Is another great quake coming? As Reiss weaves in well-timed twists and eerie coincidences that set the plot thrumming with tension, she also captures with compelling insight the changes adolescence brings to the complex relationships among Violet, her sisters, and her parents. Reiss juggles multiple themes and plotlines with masterful control in this absorbing page-turner. (Fiction. 11-15)

Kirkus Reviews