Previously Published Review: Time at the Top and All in Good Time, Edward Ormondroyd

My main objection to this set of books is that if they were written today, they would appear as one single title (of about 350ish pages, which isn't much, considering the doorstoppers which have appeared recently in juvenile fiction). I think that the story flow would be greatly improved by this, and for my review, I'm going to treat the two of them as one story, because each of them is so greatly diminished by the lack of the other as to not be worth recommending.

Time at the Top tells of Susan's horrible March day, where, despite her foul mood, she takes the time to assist a strange absent-minded eccentric old woman (a witch of course) and is given "Three." Three of what? Trips through time, obviously! And on a rickety old elevator (which, by the end of the second book, is practically a character in it's own right).

Susan doesn't quite realize her adventure, and is only slowly coaxed into meeting and then assisting a charming family in 1881, living in a beautiful house in the same place where Susan's apartment building stands in the present.

Susan and her new friends array themselves against an oily prospecting suitor, and engage in a plan to save the family from a sad fate. In the end of Time at the Top, Susan has convinced her father to try a single trip in the elevator, and the author (inserted more dextrously in the first than in the sequel) makes a startling discovery which brings the story to a close, presumably happily.

With so many loose ends dangling around, All In Good Time picks up a lot more slowly than I would have expected, with much more of the author self-inserted, and the book fares poorly at first because of it.

Back in 1881, the parents aren't cooperating with their children's brilliant plan for them to instantly fall in love, and what's worse, the solutions the children made in the first story get bungled up and begin to fail. Everything seems on the brink of falling apart, until the eccentric old lady steps in once again to twist up time and persuade our set of heroes that they can save the day after all.

All ends well; an amusing (and deserved) fate for the villians, a gratifying finish for the heroes, and the author is easily forgiven for his enthusiastic barging into the story - after all, it isn't often that one gets to assist a time-meddling witch!