Review: "Both Sides of Time" by Caroline B. Cooney

Both Sides of Time by Caroline B. Cooney
Published 1995
★★★★

This series, my gosh. I had the whole quartet as a kid (bought the fourth book in hardcover and everything), and I just loved it. Both Sides of Time sees Annie Lockwood, a very average teenager in 1995, accidentally fall through time and land in 1895...where she becomes embroiled in high society life and scandal and romance and about as much as can be packed into a 200-page book.

YA was a different beast when I was a teenager. Among other things, I think the characters tended to be more realistic and less...aspirational? In some respects, anyway. I noticed this with the Face on the Milk Carton series, also by Cooney, that I just reread. Today's 15-year-olds of YA novels are ambitious; they want to be reporters or writers or doctors, or they want to challenge the status quo at their high school, or they want to get the lead in the school musical and have it catapult them to Broadway. (I'm generalizing wildly, of course, but...let's go with it for the moment.) Annie does not want this: Annie wants a Great Romance. Eventually, sure, she'll want more than that—but right now she wants chivalry and glamour; she's well aware that her boyfriend Sean is not her Great Romance, but he'll do for now, and maybe she'll be able to get some romance from him this summer, and that'll be enough. She wants to change him (never going to work, Annie), but not because she's madly in love with him despite his flaws—more that she hopes that maybe there's potential in there somewhere. I'm here for it.

I was going to say that it's a breath of fresh air compared to contemporary YA, where characters tend to be convinced that their teenage lover is their soulmate and they're meant to be, but Annie does have to go and ruin it by falling in instalove with Strat, the rich young heir of 1895. But even then...it's fascinating to see how many things just don't entirely click between them. Annie thinks she's pulling off being an 1890s character, and then we pop into someone else's point of view and see just how much they're noticing that she wouldn't even consider. And although she's head over heels for Strat in 1895, he'd have an awfully hard time if he landed in 1995, because his entire upbringing has taught him that girls can't do that. (Doesn't really matter what 'that' is. Girls can't.) I'll get into a bit more about the other characters in later books, but right now I'm just happy that this book holds up...on both sides of time.