Review: "For All Time" by Caroline B. Cooney

For All Time by Caroline B. Cooney
Published 2001
★★★★

And we've reached book 4, in which Annie tries to fall back a century to find Strat again...but instead finds herself falling far, far father back. Back to ancient Egypt, where she doesn't speak the language or understand the culture and where the locals are not always convinced that she is human. Where tomb robbing is called tomb robbing rather than archeological expeditions...and she finds herself in a tomb at risk of being robbed.

I remember, vaguely, finding this one in the bookstore (Borders, probably?) when I was 13. This was back before it was easy to find information about upcoming books on the Internet, so when a new book from one of your favorite series spontaneously showed up at the bookstore, it felt like an unexpected Christmas. I bought this in hardcover, and I adored it. Cooney is working with a number of storylines here, which overlap in various ways: there's Annie, of course, landing in ancient Egypt; there's Katie, who is living and working at a hospital for people with Hansen's disease (at the time called leprosy); there's Camilla, a young Polish-American woman struggling to support her family after the death of her father; and there's Renifer, an Egyptian girl whose expectations of life are about to be upended by revelations about her father and her fiancé. Plus, of course, smaller story strands about Strat and so on (but we don't care that much about Strat).

Now...per usual, Annie's story is the least interesting of the bunch. She doesn't do much here: she romanticizes life in the late 1800s and early 1900s; she mopes about hoping to run away from her life for the sake of romance; she flails and stumbles and sweats when she lands in Egypt. On the other hand, I kind of love this for her; I love that we see Annie thinking she's managing and then Renifer and her cohort looking at her and going 'uh, nope'. (Annie also somehow forgets certain things: "Tell me everything," said Annie. Tell me about your life, and Devonny, and Harriett and Katie and what happened and where everybody is and all that."* Umm, Annie...? Harriett is dead. And you were there when it happened. Is your little romance really so important that you've forgotten all that?

I still love the book: I like Camilla and would read something longer about her; seeing Renifer grow is also pretty fascinating. But rereading this series as an adult, it's also clearer to me where the books fail readers; as noted about the previous books, the level of fatphobia is...it's high. I won't quote it, but there are multiple detailed descriptions of how grotesque Hiram Stratton is in his fatness. Although it's a relatively small proportion of the book—and it's in line with how fiction was talking about fatness in the 90s/early 2000s—it's troublesome enough that I'd be reluctant to recommend the series to a lot of YA readers now.

*Library ebook does not have useful page numbers, alas