Friday, August 07, 2020

Time Rose #3 - The Spirit Rose

The latest and (sob) last book should be out or at least coming soon. It is the grand finale of the Time Rose time travel series for kids and those of us who always like MG/YA books over the nasty old adult scribbles.

Until the book is in my hot Kindle and I've had a chance to review it, I'm going to show my reviews for the first five of the books in the series. I'm just grabbing my reviews from Goodreads. I encourage you to check out the entire series if you're a history buff who's a kid at heart. Here's my review for the first in the series. I'll be putting all the reviews up here until I get to GENERATIONS FIVE!!!!!

The Spirit Rose by Renee Duke
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

First, Happy 105th Birthday to Grantie Etta!

The Rose series is a delight. Three kids--Paige, Dane, and Jack--are the fifth generation of a special family. What’s so special about them? Each generation's children are given the family heirloom, a Rose Medallion, which allows those possessing it to travel back in time. There's a bit of a catch. They don't get to pick the time period they land in. The Medallion chooses for them. Their job as time travelers is to aid and assist whoever they meet who possess a Rose artifact (there are several)and desperately need help.

Briefly, book 1 of the series, "The Disappearing Rose," takes the kids back to the 15th Century to help a couple of princes who are living in a notorious tower with several people casting designs on the crown the older one has just inherited. Book 2, "The Mud Rose," has the kids helping two orphans in Victorian times escape the attention of a certain serial killer named Jack the Ripper.

In this third book, the kids attempt to take a time jaunt while the three are still all together (Paige and Dane live in Canada), but they get tossed back into their own time. Puzzled, they consult the prior medallion users, who happens to include Grantie Etta and a couple of others in the older Medallion generations.

Grantie Etta is a very orderly hoarder with rooms full of artifacts going back in time several centuries. She recalls a book written by a former medallion user. The elders and the kids try to figure out what Etta's Aunt Rosalina was trying to tell future generations. The story is not a pretty one. An evil sorcerer is after the Medallion along with every other Rose artifact spread across time.

When Paige and Dane's parents start saying things that make no sense (it was sunny in Canada when they left for England, but the parents now claim a flood threatened the area). Other oddities are brought to light. Clearly, the evil sorcerer is finding ways to mess with timelines, making the kids' pasts change. They remember what is supposed to be, but others who are not Medallion users haven't a clue things have changed and not for the better. He’s also not happy about the family’s little time traveling tradition, and intends to put a stop to it.

This is so much fun to read with multiple generations working together to stop a mad man from changing today's world by manipulating the past. There are a lot of characters in this book. I suspect that some of those relatives who've shown up for Grantie Etta's birthday may be involved in the series to come. One family, in particular, has all the makings of future villainy.

Any more and I'd be scooping out spoilers like ice cream, so I'll stop here and just say, read books 1 and 2 of the series or you might get a bit lost in this one. They're all rousing good reads for both children and adults.

Remember, read "The Disappearing Rose," "The Mud Rose," then this book, "The Spirit Rose." You'll be glad you did.

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