The Gideon Trilogy, Part One-: The Time-Travellers by Laura Buckley-Archer

Peter Schock watches the approach of the holidays with surprising eagerness. He's been promised a birthday treat by his father, but each time it's been put off due to his father's work. He can't even count on his mother being there- she's producing a film out in California, and hasn't been home in more than six months.

But when his father has to put his birthday treat off again, Peter is angry, and tells his father that he hates him. His father tells him Margrit, their Au Pair, will be taking Peter to the country for the weekend to be with some old friends of hers. Peter finds it hard to care any more, and just goes to his room. His father drives off, and Peter doesn't even watch him go.

Later, Peter and Margit arrive in Derbyshire, at the house of the Dyers. Dr. Dyer is a physics prof, and is working on a machine which distorts gravity. He offers to show Peter and his oldest daughter, Kate, and they easily agree, and Kate brings Molly, the family dog. But when Molly runs away, Peter and Kate chase her, and pass out in the basement.

In 1763, Gideon Seymour, an ex-thief who is trying to reform, sees Peter and Kate fall from the sky and into his time. Their arrival is also noticed by a Master Thief and thug named the Tar Man, who confiscates the machine which has arrived with them and steals it, leaving Kate and Peter stranded in the past.

Rescued by Gideon, Peter and Kate realize that they are completely helpless, and must rely on Gideon for assistance. He helps them by taking them to his new employers, a sympathetic family named the Byngs, who provide them with clothing befitting their station in life and give them food and shelter as the supposed victims of a bandit attack.

But to get home, they need the machine that brought them there, and while Kate discovers that she can "blur" herself back to the past, to stay there requires increasing effort and is painful the longer she tries to return. Soon, Peter can do it, too, and while everyone in the future is looking for them, their blurring has an effect- making them appear to be ghosts which are spotted all over as they try to "blur" their way back home.

But to truly return home, they must find the machine that brought them here, and that resides with Lord Luxton, Gideon's former employer and a dangerous man known as the "Thief-taker", who makes his living returning stolen goods or ratting out thieves to the police. But once he realizes what he has, will the Tar Man return their possessions, or will they be able to winkle the machine out of his possession? Will either of them see their loved ones again?

Despite wanting to like this book, I found myself much too bored by it to care very much about tha characters. Both Peter and Kate seem very spoiled an naive in comparison to their 18th century counterparts, and while some parts of the story are good, I found the writing style a bit too dull to really keep my interest.

And though Kate and Peter are supposed to be the Protagonists, it is Gideon who comes off the best in the novel. Now, the novel starts with the affectation that is is Gideon's memoirs we are reading, Gideon remains something of a mystery. We don't get to know his thoughts, as we do Kate and Peter (though more Peter than Kate), and so we get he's supposed to be a stand-up kind of man, we don't get to know him well enough to consider him the main character.

And this is why the story bored me. Who is supposed to be the main protagonist? Richard? Kate? Richard and Kate? Gideon? I could never tell, and though the book proclaims this the "Gideon Trilogy" we don't get into his thoughts enough for me to even consider him a main character- which just confuses the heck out of me. So the book came off rather scattered in that way.

Other things that bothered me are that the NASA scientists who come to Dr. Dyer to discuss the disappearance of the gravity machine actually scratch out a message left by Kate in the past in an old brick in the basement of her school- and the detective in charge of the case lets them get away with it! I felt that was just stupid. Surely Britain has charges of tampering with evidence as much as the USA does?!

Put all of these (and more) together, and I just lost all interest in the story. I did manage to finish the book, but I felt no need to go out and read the next book in the trilogy (The Time Thief, for those who are still interested), and I wouldn't be recommending them to anyone, either. This book just lost me with a bunch of uninteresting maybe-protagonists and some silly plotting. Not recommended.