The Difficult Job of Keeping Time by Dyan Sheldon

Kiki and Trish live on the same estate, and go to the same school, but barely know each other because of the vast numbers of other people who do those things too. Still, as little as they know about each other, they know even less about the strange Betty Friedman, in whose living room they find themselves having tea on the first day of the half term holidays. They’ve never seen this peculiar woman before, let alone spoken to her, but in accepting her offer of a place of refuge from the local bullies, they unwittingly become embroiled in a bizarre plot to destroy a sacred monument, and end up travelling through time in an attempt to recover the crucial documents needed to prevent its demolition.

Wow, what a start to what is quite frankly a pretty unusual book, and definitely a step away from the author’s usual offerings of good-yet-girlie-fluff reads such as Planet Janet. Fantasy is a genre I only like if it’s done really well, but I thought this book did exactly that, and that it was reminiscent of The Invisible Girl which some of you may have read, or the Harry Potter series which I’m sure many more of you have done. The quality I most enjoy in all these books, including The Difficult Job… is the way they can take something completely outrageous (wizards, time travel, talking cats) and base a story around them in such a way that somehow you believe that these things are entirely possible in the world. It’s the complete opposite of the This could never happen thought as you start to think This could happen…and maybe one day it will.

In this story we have 3 unlikely heroes – sensible yet sceptical Trish who doesn’t believe in nonsense such as travelling through time, downtrodden Kiki who is cautious precisely because he does believe in these things, and the eccentric Time Keeper Betty, who doesn’t just believe, she knows for sure. However, to keep any good story balanced, you also need some rotten baddies, which in this case come in the form of the evil destroyer of time Sir Alistair Deuce and some, ahem, civil servants. The messages in the book are very clear, and you have no sympathy whatsoever for the bad guys, which rather helps in aligning you to the mission of the good guys who in themselves are a rather delightful if slightly precocious group.

Though a lot of the book is set in the past, there are moments when you cannot help but be drawn back in to today’s world, for example with conversations like this:

Film stars get a great deal of money to do very little while Sir Alistair is paid a great deal of money to destroy very much

You mean like some kind of terrorist?

I mean like a property developer

This is also an example of the, um, interesting view points that come across throughout the story, from thoughts on child labour to asylums and, yes, the perils of property development. The writing throughout is engaging and the use of the present rather than past tense for most of the book has the interesting effect of putting you right there in the centre of the action as it happens, rather than observing what has gone on from the sidelines.

I didn’t expect to like this book as much as I did, but having finished it in 24 hours I would now wholeheartedly recommend it to those who like a good action story or a mystery story, as well of course as those who like alternative worlds of portals and time travel and mysterious characters,

Thank you to the publishers for sending in a copy of this book to The Bookbag.

If they enjoyed The Difficult Job of Keeping Time, they might also like The Invisible Girl by Laura Ruby.

Please share on: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram

You can read more book reviews or buy The Difficult Job of Keeping Time by Dyan Sheldon at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.

Comments

Like to comment on this review?

Just send us an email and we'll put the best up on the site.