Until We Meet Again

August 1, 2015
Mystery, romance, time travel, and danger...this one has it all. Cassandra would rather be home alone in Ohio or gallivanting around Europe with her best friend, but she's stuck in a snooty beach town in Massachusetts on a family vacation. It's not that she doesn't love her family; it's just that there's absolutely nothing and no one she wants to relate to here. Until she steps onto the private beach attached to their rented house and meets Lawrence, that is. Handsome, courtly, interested in her, and generating an immediate attraction, Lawrence comes from a different world-quite literally: the past. Living in the same house but separated by almost 100 years, Cass and Lawrence fall head over heels for each other, even if they can't see each other except on their isolated stretch of beach. With access to the Internet, Cass looks into Lawrence's life only to discover that in his time, he is due to be murdered in a matter of days. Alternating narration between her protagonists, Collins gives her characters voices that evoke their respective times, Cass' modern, slightly snarky voice contrasting with Lawrence's formal cadences. Their present-tense accounts present an interesting, often amusing intersection of the Roaring '20s and the 21st century. Suspenseful, poignant, and romantic: well worth the read. (Fantasy. 12-18)

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September 1, 2015

Gr 8 Up-Two emotional teenagers meet on the beach and bond over art, poetry, and feeling misunderstood, only to find out they live in the same house-90 years apart. Cassandra and Lawrence can only see each other on the strip of private beach behind the house that Lawrence occupies in 1925 and that Cassandra's family is renting in 2015. Cassandra takes to the library to do some digging on her new beau and discovers he was/is going to be murdered on that very beach in just 10 days. The love-struck teens are torn between staying in their own time periods to investigate (and try to prevent) the murder and spending what might be Lawrence's last days on Earth together. The romance is woozy and breathless, which gives it a classic feel, and the investigating the teens do on both sides of the event builds some suspense. While there's quite a bit readers have to accept here (not one person in either time period is interested in using this beautiful private beach except the teens, ensuring nobody figures out their secret until the very end; any culture shock Lawrence might be feeling at the language and dress from 2015 is brushed off a little too easily; and the explanation as to why they can see each other in the first place is spotty), readers with a flair for the dramatic and romantic will overlook these points easily. VERDICT A hazy, romantic mystery that might appeal to fans of Nicholas Sparks.-Beth McIntyre, Madison Public Library, WI

Copyright 2015 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2015
Grades 9-12 Cassandra and Lawrence, a love for the ages, find a fitting setting upon the shore of a Gatsbyesque mansion in Crest Harbor, Massachusetts.?Seventeen-year-old?Cassandra, her mom, stepdad, and toddler brother, Eddie, have rented the house for the summer. Lawrence and his uncle Ned, meanwhile, live in that very same house, except at a different timenamely the 1920s. The two parties are connected by travel through the space-time continuum, which Collins establishes with a surreal flash of light, a full moon, and alternating chapters, effective bait for fans of Niffenegger, Byatt, and du Maurier. Or perhaps readers will simply relish the harlequin image of the chaste lovers on the beach amid the crashing waves. After Lawrence's life is revealed to be in danger, Cassandra spends hours in the town library researching in hopes of changing historybut is that the best course of action after a friend ceases to exist when an ancestor becomes involved in a fatal accident? A satisfying summer read in every way; pack this one in the beach bag.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)