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Aug. 25th, 2020 08:40 pmAster Glenn Gray's new spy romance is up for preorder now, which reminded me that I had not gotten around to writing up her latest, The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball!
The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball is quite different from the other Aster Glenn Gray books I've read -- it's a really charming kid's fantasy along the lines of Edward Eager or Anne Lindbergh, of the genre "lonely child makes friend via magic, the limits of which imperil the friendship." Eleven-year-old Piper has just moved to a new town with her older sister Angela and their newly-widowed, depressed father when she receives a mysterious note from someone she doesn't know, apologizing for something that hasn't happened to her yet.
The note turns out to come from Rosie, the girl who lived in the house fifty-ish years ago, who has apparently been having time-travel encounters with Piper for years -- always when Piper is aged eleven. Over the course of the next few months (in Piper-time), Rosie and Piper's friendship strengthens even as everything else in Piper's life feels like it's crumbling. But the more important Rosie becomes to Piper, the more worried Piper starts to get about what's going to happen when she hits her twelfth birthday ....
Aster Glenn Gray is really good at writing believable, complex kid-friendships; magic brings Rosie and Piper together, but what keeps them together is a shared sense of imagination and the dramatic, the fact that they're both kids who are willing and eager to lean into the magic and try and figure out its rules. I also love Piper's relationship with Angela, who is trying extremely hard to balance "making new friends and figure out own life in new place" with "be a good older sister to a little sister who's really struggling" and mostly but not always doing an endearingly good job of it, which is deeply important but still not quite enough to be everything that Piper needs.
This could also very easily be the kind of story that ends in a melancholic fashion, with the fading-away of magic, and I'm very glad to report that's not the case! I would have loved this book when I was twelve and I found it extremely delightful to read now, too.
The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball is quite different from the other Aster Glenn Gray books I've read -- it's a really charming kid's fantasy along the lines of Edward Eager or Anne Lindbergh, of the genre "lonely child makes friend via magic, the limits of which imperil the friendship." Eleven-year-old Piper has just moved to a new town with her older sister Angela and their newly-widowed, depressed father when she receives a mysterious note from someone she doesn't know, apologizing for something that hasn't happened to her yet.
The note turns out to come from Rosie, the girl who lived in the house fifty-ish years ago, who has apparently been having time-travel encounters with Piper for years -- always when Piper is aged eleven. Over the course of the next few months (in Piper-time), Rosie and Piper's friendship strengthens even as everything else in Piper's life feels like it's crumbling. But the more important Rosie becomes to Piper, the more worried Piper starts to get about what's going to happen when she hits her twelfth birthday ....
Aster Glenn Gray is really good at writing believable, complex kid-friendships; magic brings Rosie and Piper together, but what keeps them together is a shared sense of imagination and the dramatic, the fact that they're both kids who are willing and eager to lean into the magic and try and figure out its rules. I also love Piper's relationship with Angela, who is trying extremely hard to balance "making new friends and figure out own life in new place" with "be a good older sister to a little sister who's really struggling" and mostly but not always doing an endearingly good job of it, which is deeply important but still not quite enough to be everything that Piper needs.
This could also very easily be the kind of story that ends in a melancholic fashion, with the fading-away of magic, and I'm very glad to report that's not the case! I would have loved this book when I was twelve and I found it extremely delightful to read now, too.
