Backward Glass

by David Lomax

[Angie]

I received an ARC through NetGalley.

Time travel is quickly working its way up my favorite genres list, and I absolutely loved how it operated in Backward Glass. Kenny’s family moves into an old house that has been rumored to be haunted, since there’s tales of a mad man in the woods surrounding it and several kids had gone missing over the years. But Kenny soon learns the truth behind these rumors: there’s a mirror that allows you to travel back and forth in time, and sometimes you don’t come back. The story doesn’t start with a mirror though. It actually begins with finding a dead baby shoved in a wall. Morbid? Most definitely. Intriguing? Heck yes! Now Kenny (and the other mirror kids) are on a mission to discover who the dead baby is and save it, wherever in time it may be.

While I did really enjoy all of the science fiction aspects and the excitement of Backward Glass, I was hoping that the whole dead baby thing would just be the catalyst that gets the story rolling. I didn’t really want the whole thing to be centered around saving some mystery infant from times long past, but in the last third or so, this definitely becomes the case. There’s a pregnant girl in the past who wants Kenny’s help, and Kenny tries to play hero, and there’s old fashioned childbirth and ew. No thanks! I was much more interested in the creepy skipping rhyme about Prince Harming, who is somehow involved with the mirror and the dead baby. The variations on the rhyme and the tale are weird and kept me reading, especially when Prince Harming actually makes an appearance. He’s definitely not what me or Kenny were expecting.

The actual time traveling set up is awesome! There’s no crazy, intense, complicated quantum physics in Backward Glass. The mirror is actually very simple and we’re told all of the rules along the way. The basic idea is that you go in and come out 10 years in the past, then you can go back to your own time when you’re ready. However, travelers can also do a kind of chain to get further past or even into the future. Eventually other more complicated stuff gets introduced and my head started spinning, but over all I loved all of this. Kenny gets to meet a bunch of other characters who help him on his mission; my favorite being John Wald from 17th century Scotland.

In the end, I liked Backward Glass a lot. It started to lose me towards the end when the whole baby saving mission came back to the foreground. Babies gross me out, so yeah. I would have enjoyed it much more if that Prince Harming legend had played a larger role and was the main focus. I loved visiting all of the different time periods, particularly the 80s! Kenny’s crash course into Nintendo and Star Wars was hilarious!

Read more of my reviews at Pinkindle Reads & Reviews.