Asakiyume mita

The Time-Traveling Popcorn Ball is a wonderful, unique story. Its protagonist, Piper, is eleven, and I think it has the potential to be a beloved favorite of readers of that age, but it's also a very rewarding story to read as an adult.

I've been calling it a time travel story, but really it's a friendship-between-times story, in that the focus isn't really on traveling through time so much as it is having a friend from a different era. Piper's friend from a different era is Rosie, who's from approximately fifty years in her past. I say approximately, because Piper encounters Rosie when Rosie is different ages, and that's part of what makes this story so very cool: for Piper, the friendship is an intense one that unfolds over three months; for Rosie, Piper is a figure in her life from the time she's four years old up until shortly before her thirteenth birthday.

My recollections of stories of friendships between times are that they progress chronologically for both parties--but why should they? And in The Time Traveling Popcorn Ball, they don't. Piper's first encounter with Rosie is not Rosie's first encounter with Piper, and Piper doesn't experience Rosie's first encounter (if you follow me) until well into their friendship.

Because of the difference in how they experience each other, they play vastly different roles in each other's lives. For Rosie, Piper is a life-long guardian and secret friend, a big sister who's better than her real big sister, a magical person who gives her glimpses of the future (iPods! the end of Communism!). For Piper, Rosie is also a secret friend, but a secret friend in a lonely, hard time, after Piper's mother has died and her father, who has been rendered a zombie by grief, has packed up Piper and her sister Angela and moved them to a new town, where live in much reduced circumstances. For Piper, Rosie is a blessed escape from all that.

Not only do the two girls have the sorts of conversational exchanges that you can count on in any Aster Glenn Gray story,** their friendship is also suffused with random, unobtrusive, delightful magic, which they discover and revel in just the way you knew you'd revel in it if you were lucky enough to find it. The magic exists without commentary or explanation and is entirely wonderful.

The end is also daring and satisfying--the eleven-year-old in me loves it, and so does the fifty-six-year-old. This book exists as a paperback! I'd love to see it get into the hands of some eleven-year-olds. But I also think there are a lot of twelve-to-seventy-year-olds (and beyonnnnnd!) who will love it.

**For example, Rosie says this at one point to Piper:

“Sometimes I think growing up is just erosion. Like we start out as igneous rocks. The volcanoes spew out magma and it hardens in the air and becomes rock. And these rocks start out all spiky and odd shaped. But then they fall in the sea and it washes away all their rough edges, and they all end up smooth at the end, all boring and just the same. I see it happening to my sister, and…” She shuddered, shaking her head as if she could shake away bad thoughts, and skipped quickly up the steps to the next porch.

And at another point, talking about books, Piper says this to Rosie:

I frowned. “I do like Charlotte’s Web,” I said.  “I mean, I like the talking animals, and Charlotte, and Templeton the Rat. But I don’t get the end – I don’t see why Fern gives up the talking animals. Why can’t she be interested in both animals and boys?”

Amazon purchase link--it's the paperback, but you can switch to the Kindle version.