Twice Upon a Time

Michelle Harrison has rightly carved herself a place amongst the best junior fiction writers for offering a sense of mystery and encouraging a challenged readership to complete ‘just one more page’. Twice upon a time is another fine example of this skill, providing an engaging and fast-paced adventure alongside believable characters that young readers will relate to in many of their trials, if not in their exceptional powers to manipulate time.

Meredith and Rose are twins and although identical, their differences are apparent from the outset – something that will please many twins reading the title. The pair are born either side of the clock striking new year and so are inevitably bonded and yet set apart by the years they were born and their personalities. Yet the pair share an unusual ability to stop time, as their mother discovers at their birth – and this is to become a central feature in the plot.

The children leave London with their mum, who works in art restoration. They arrive at Fox House which has all the expected trappings of any mystery setting: there is a section of the house which has been damaged and has been left untouched, there is a locked study, the house itself is far from the city life the children have led in London. The characters the children meet are equally well developed and characteristically questionable – a missing woman, the death of a lord, an abandoned baby. There are characters too that readers will instantly like and empathise with like Ben – and so, both the twins and the readers quickly adjust to this strange landscape and begin to unearth the secrets held at Fox House.

Truly engaging, right to the end, offering readers both escapism and much craved adventure and teachers a quality text with challenging language and plot development – both to support book talk and to support developing writing, this is a book with much appeal.