Another boy’s book in which time travel makes my head hurt. “Time is a river in which we can travel both forward into the future and back into the past.” The urchins watched Back to the Future 2 last night, and it made my head hurt, too. With The Blue Comet I just gave up on trying to understand the river of time and enjoyed the story.
Eleven year old Oscar Ogilvie lives with his dad in a little house in Cairo, Illinois. Mom is dead, but Dad and Oscar are happy with Oscar doing the cooking, Dad working as a salesman for the John Deere Tractor COmpany, and the two of them enjoying the Lionel train layout that they have in the basement. Then, the stock market crashes, and the depression hits, and Oscar’s dad loses is job and has to go to California to look for work, leaving Oscar behind to live with his crabby Aunt Carmen. All of this and a little more happens in chapters 1-4, before the time travel/magic part of the book begins. It’s a little slow, and some kids may give up before they get to the good part.
But they shouldn’t. The Blue Comet is deceptively dull at first, but the pace picks up in chapter 5 with a bank robbery, a jump into that River of Time, and some cameo appearances by famous stars and celebrities of the 1940’s such as “Dutch” Reagan, A. Hitchcock, and even a very young Jack Kennedy. It was fun to try to pick out the celebs, and it was enjoyable just to follow the story of our boy-hero, Oscar, as he worked his way from one side of the country to the other and from one era to the next and then back to the past where he came from.
The illustrations in this book by Bagram Ibatoulline deserve, indeed require, a mention. I wish I could show you an example. The pictures are full-color painting in a sort of Norman Rockwell-style. They’re just beautiful and quite evocative of the time period. I guess the cover illustration will have to do to give you an idea, but the pictures inside the book are even better.
So time travel. Electric trains. Depression-era. A boy and his dad. Oh, and Rudyard Kipling’s “If” and a disappearing math teacher. Bank robbers foiled. Surely, one or more of those will capture your interest in this well-told tale of historical adventure.