As a middle child stuck between two sets of twins, eleven-year-old Miri Gill feels an outsider until one day in her attic room, she slips back in time from the 21st century to 1935 where she meets Molly, another eleven-year-old who needs her help.

Also in need of some help is the model of time travel in the story, which is a mishmash of popular representations that no person at age eleven or elsewhen should be exposed to. Specifically, I would have enjoyed an attempt to square the Branching Timeline implied by the hole in floor with the single nonbranching, static timeline and Ex Nihilo paradox hinted at by the time-travel device. I truly liked that ex nihilo paradox, and wish it had been explicitly dealt with rather than swept under the carpet.
Michael Main
If you think about it too long, you’re going to go crazy, and then I’ll never get to your time.

Tags

(8)

Variants

(3)
  1. The Magic Half by Annie Barrows (Bloomsbury Children’s Books, January 2008).
  2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by Annie Barrows
  3. with a new epilogue.
    The Magic Half by Annie Barrows (Bloomsbury Children’s Books, September 2014).
  4. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by Annie Barrows
  5. audio reading, including the epilogue.
    The Magic Half by Annie Barrows (Dreamscape Media, September 2014).
  6. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by Annie Barrows
    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . narrated by Cris Dukehart

Translations

(1)
  1. Turkish.
    Sihirli kardeşim by Annie Barrows (Pegasus Yayınları :: Pegasus Yayınlareh, late 2014).
  2. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . written by Annie Barrows
    . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . translated by Seçil Şen

Indexer Notes

(4)
  1. A Time Travel Teaser! Just how did Horst get a comic book featuring Tarzan on the cover in July 1935? Tarzan had been around for some time by the 30s, but we haven’t spotted a Tarzan cover on a comic until the April 1936 release of Tip Top Comics #1. Maybe Horst was a time traveler, too.
  2. A Time Travel Teaser! Celotape that survives intact for over seventy years? We want some of that up in the ITTDB Citadel.
  3. Debut—The January 2008[d/] date of the first release is from the copyright page of the hardcover.
  4. Audio Debut—The September 2014[d/] date comes from Goodreads and the end of the audio CD.