A Tale of Time City

Along with most of my other Diana Wynne Jones books, I scooped up A Tale of Time City in a library book sale a few years ago. It's not my favourite Wynne Jones story -- the premise is so complicated that I have trouble getting my head around it, including a city outside time that oversees history, four 'polarities' that somehow anchor the city in time and space, a villain trying to sabotage history, an evacuee from 1939 who ends up in the middle of all this impersonating a cousin... It's enjoyable, but I still struggle to understand exactly what's happening!

However, perhaps the real lesson is that time is important in another way, as in the time of your life that you encounter a book. There is a reviewer on Goodreads who passionately adores A Tale of Time City. She was given it as a nine year old, and it blew her mind, introducing her to concepts about time and history that she hadn't thought about before, enchanting her with its inventiveness and ingenuity. Certainly I can believe this is a book that would benefit from repeated reading, the way a child reads a favourite book, over and over until it soaks into your bones. I must have read A Tale of Time City before, years ago, but I couldn't remember anything at all about it. Maybe I needed to meet it when I was nine, too.