Tanglewreck

by Jeanette Winterson

I’m not an expert on the details and specifics of time travel, and unfortunately, Tanglewreck expected me to be. Although the main character was an 11 year old girl who struggled with the explanations given about how and why there were disturbances in Time, it seemed that Winterson felt her readers should easily grasp the convoluted scientific jargon. I didn’t. I felt dumb. And reading a children’s book should not make you feel dumb.

That wasn’t my only complaint. Silver, the book’s heroine, and the other main characters, weren’t sufficiently developed during the book to make me sympathize with them or even really hate the bad guys. Tanglewreck had an interesting premise, but I never got the impression that the author had put enough thought into the story; the title seemed insignificant, because Winterson failed to emphasize its importance.

If nothing else, Tanglewreck boosts my total number of pages read for the year, but I didn’t get much else out of it.