The Little Shop of Found Things
- by Paula Brackston
- Novel
- Fantasy
- Adults
- Definite Time Travel
- English
- The Little Shop of Found Things by Paula Brackston (St. Martin’s Press, October 2018).
Xanthe Westlake and her mother are looking for a fresh start as owners of an antique shop in the village of Marlborough when a 17th century silver chanelaine calls to Xanthe’s psychic powers and eventually takes her on a quest to save a young servant girl in 1605 (and maybe, in the process, meet a handsome young architect with oddly modern views on women).
—Michael Main
Had she somehow crucially alterted her own present by changing Alice’s future? The thought that she might have started some terrible chain of events that she could not possibly have foreseen, nor known about, worried her more and more. It was only in the small hours of Wednesday night that an answer came to her that seemed to make sense. The present that she knew, the way things were in her time, could only have come about if she had traveled back to the past. Her finding the chatelaine, her answering Alice’s call for help, those things were necessary to shape the past and bring about the future as it was. She had to believe this. It did work. She was a part of how things had turned out, not an alternative version, but the one she was meant to live in. If she hadn’t gone back, hadn’t taken the decision to help Alice, well, that wouldhave resulted in a different future from the one she knew.
Tags
(9)
- Time Periods
- Circa AD 1600 to 1699: Alice’s time.
- Circa AD 2000 to 2099: presumed time period, August 2018.
- Time Travel Methods
- Emotional Outcries through Time: Xanthe hears Alice calling to her.
- Wearable Time Object: Xanthe seems to need the silver chatelaine to travel.
- Wish Travel: And there is a mental aspect of Xanthe wishing on her locket that comes into play.
- Themes
- Artist Paradox: A minor artist paradox when Alice describes the screen to Samuel who then creates it.
- Touched by a Time Traveler: Xanthe desperately wants to save Alice, although not entirely for altruistic reasons.
- Fictional Tags
- Ghosts: Alice’s mother.
- Groupings
Variants
(2)
- The Little Shop of Found Things by Paula Brackston (St. Martin’s Press, October 2018).
- audio reading.
The Little Shop of Found Things by Paula Brackston (Macmillan Audio, October 2018).
Indexer Notes
(1)
- Time Travel Model—Aghhhh! Paula Brackston comes within a whisker of creating a single static timeline. Xanthe thinks to herself that the time she knew ”could only have come about if she had traveled back to the past. But alas, it all falls apart because she finds the crucial silver scizzors and needle case hidden in the present and then goes back to remove them from their hiding spot so that they are no longer hidden in that spot in her present. This was doubly sad because there was a slick solution that has her finding the items in the future and then taking them back to save Alice—and that solution would have created a cool static timeline.