A Time Apart

Author: Diane Stanley

Age: Children (9-13ish)
(I think I read this book in my early teens, but it came from the children's section of the library. What can I say, when I was a teenager I read kids' books, and now that I'm an adult I read teen books.)

This is another one of those books that I read a long time ago, remembered liking, and re-read so I could tell you about it. I know it's a little young, but I still enjoyed it when I re-read it, and hopefully even if you don't like children's books you'll pass on the recommendation to kids you know. Also, fun fact: Diane Stanley is the author/illustrator of all those fun historical picture books like Cleopatra and Good Queen Bess that I loved when I was a kid. I believe this was her first novel.
















When Ginny's mom finds out she has cancer and requires immediate and intense treatment, she packs up thirteen-year-old Ginny and puts her on a plane to stay with her dad, Hugh, in London. Ginny and her mom live in Houston, and she's seen little of her dad while growing up, so she expects that living with him is going to be awkward. What she doesn't expect is for a stranger to pick her up at the London airport and take her to the university where Hugh is an archaeology professor so Hugh's boss can tell her that her dad is spending a year living on an Iron Age-style farm as an archaeological experiment. Ginny is given a hand-woven dress and taken to the farm.

Life on the farm is very different from modern life. All the families participating in the experiment live together in a large, thatched roundhouse. Everything must be done by hand, including growing the food they will eat and making the pots they will cook it in. Ginny quickly becomes popular with the group because she turns out to be a pretty decent cook (in part because, as an American, she actually uses spices). She adjusts pretty well to the new lifestyle (much better than I would have at thirteen!), making friends with seventeen-year-old Corey, a quiet boy who eventually opens up to Ginny, and five-year-old Daisy, whose parents are graduate students with little time for her and are desperately missing her nanny. Ginny even begins to understand and appreciate Hugh, whose stereotypical British reserve makes him hard to figure out at first. But all the time Ginny is missing and worrying about her mother, and finally she conceives of a daring plan to escape back to Houston.

In an author's note at the end of the book, Diane Stanley explains that she came up with the setting first. It's based on a BBC documentary about a group of people who performed this sort of experiment in the 1970s. The setting is really fascinating and is described in much detail. But the book is primarily about human relationships and about learning to let people in. As Ginny's mom seems to push her away, the people on the farm become her family. So the setting is really perfect for this, because it's about a culture in which all of the members of the community are absolutely dependent on each other for survival. Our modern lives in Western society are so isolated, and it's a revelation to everyone on the farm to learn what it means to be close to others, even the members of their own biological families.

Reading this as a mother, I tried to figure out what was going through Ginny's mom's head when she sent Ginny away. It's not like Ginny's a demanding little kid. She's a fairly self-sufficient thirteen-year-old. I would think that Ginny would be helpful and that her mom would want to keep her around. Is it a bit of selfishness on her part, a feeling of "I've spent 13 years looking after this kid and I'm sick and exhausted and it's someone else's turn"? If that's it, while it's not particularly noble, it is understandable. Is it pride, mixed with a desire to protect Ginny, so that she doesn't want Ginny to see her while she's sick? Is it mere practicality--she's going to spend a lot of time in the hospital, and Ginny can't drive, so she can't be left on her own for that long? Does it stem from the fear that she's not going to be around much longer, so she wants Ginny to start bonding with her dad? We never get a straight answer, although Ginny asks many times (after all, Ginny's mom has been her whole life up to now, and it hurts to be sent away). But from what Ginny's mom does say, it seems like she's motivated by a combination of all of these.

The one thing that bothered me about this book was that Ginny seems so naive about her mother's cancer. She's thirteen! So I tried to think back to when I was thirteen and how I would have responded. My sister had cancer when I was twelve, and actually I don't remember it worrying me that much. But hers was a transitory kind--it was supposed to go away on its own. And she never really seemed sick from it, certainly not like all the toddlers with shaved heads at the oncologist's. I felt awful for those kids. But I don't think I ever really panicked about my sister--although that could just be hindsight, because the cancer did go away and it didn't come back, so of course in retrospect it doesn't seem like that big a deal. So I don't know.

This was an enjoyable read. It's not one of my absolute favorites, like The Exiles. But it's pretty good. If you like children's books, you should read it. If you feel too old for them, then don't bother. But keep it in mind if you ever need to find a book for a pre-teen girl (or boy--Ginny isn't super girly).


Other books you might enjoy: historical fiction like The Royal Diaries or Ann Rinaldi; books about time travel like Both Sides of Time by Caroline B. Cooney, Voices After Midnight by Richard Peck, The Indian in the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks, Switching Well by Peni R. Griffin, and A Handful of Time by Kit Pearson (which is extra cool because it's set on the lake where I spent some of my childhood summers); books about girls whose lives change when their families move to a kibbutz in Israel like One More River by Lynne Reid Banks or Lydia, Queen of Palestine by Uri Orlev; books about family, divorce, and life changes like the Cousins series by Colleen O'Shaughnessy McKenna, My Crazy Cousin Courtney by Judi Miller, and The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline B. Cooney