Bite Me, Timekeepers

*This is a post I started back when Daylights Savings Time had just started again and was screwing me up. This should alert you all to the time it takes between Blog Post Idea and Actual Legitimate Blog Post. I am like a snail. Persistent, slow... I think this analogy should end here.*

I am not afraid to say that Daylight Savings Time sucks.
While I am not totally opposed to the general idea or even the implementation, the actual doing of it irritates me. The idea that Time can change, that we affect how the already almost impossible to measure substance running our lives is counted kind of bamboozles my brain.

Another thing running around my brain is revolution. I've been reading books on the French Revolution lately, and it is... disorientating, to say the least, to be able to draw comparisons to present day events in the East, specifically Egypt and Libya.
The only book to come to mind concerning issues of time and political rebellion was Revolution, by Jennifer Donnelly.

Andi, a high school senior, is a pill-popping, emotionally traumatized musical prodigy supporting her mother through a mental breakdown after the death of her younger brother Truman. When her estranged father enters the scene, he swiftly makes a series of decisions that will change Andi's life forever. Putting her mother in a mental hospital to help her recover, he takes Andi to Paris with him for Christmas break, so he can supervise her senior project, and help identify a young boy's heart in a glass jar, rumoured to be that of the last Dauphin - possibly King - of France, Louis-Charles, or Louis XVI, the son of Marie Antoinette.

When Andi stumbles upon a diary from the years of the French Revolution, she is intrigued and captured by Alex, a young aspiring actor who takes a position as companion and joker for Louis-Charles, and later lights fireworks for him when he is imprisoned at the age of ten by the corrupt regime of Robespierre.

I did not expect to like this book as much as I did. I got it as a gift, and my first reaction was basically I liked the author (her earlier YA novel, A Northern Light? SO MANY KINDS OF AWESOMENESS), but the premise (time travel+teen angst) didn't seem particularly appealing.
SO WRONG. (Ah, how I love the taste of literary crow in the mornings..............)

Revolution was crazy good, not only because I love historical fiction (especially the French Revolution, for some reason) but because Andi is a really, really incredible character. She's tortured and moody, but it doesn't feel as tired and boring as the patented "Teenagers + Angst = Guilt + Depression" as a plot device usually is.

An interesting undercurrent and side-plot is Andi's music. She's a talented musician, focused mainly on guitar, and the music the author chooses to mention in the book (from Led Zeppelin to Debussy) never feel like it's just being thrown in to hook People Who Like Music; it just feels like an actual facet of Andi's character.

If you're interested in reading more about Jennifer Donnelly and Revolution, she has written some really interesting things about it on her website.


Enjoying the "End of Blog Post Means I Have Accomplished Something Today" high,
RR