What Time is it
There? by Christine Potter
Publication
Date: November 29, 2017
Publisher: Evernight Teen
Just
over a year ago, Bean and Zak headed for colleges two thousand miles apart,
promising to write, but to see other people … until Bean fell for the wrong guy
and Zak fell off the planet.
Now,
Bean’s got two weeks’ worth of Zak’s year-old letters that she still can’t bear
to open—and a broken heart. Her new best friend, a guy named Amp, wants her to
read the letters and be done with it, but he may have his own reasons for that.
When
Sam shows up at Bean’s school unexpectedly and Bean tumbles into the 19th
century from the cellar of a ruined church, things start making a bizarre kind
of sense. That is, if she can just fit all the pieces together again…let's
see--there's a cult...and the Flying Singing Angel With No Feet...and of
course, The Grateful Dead...
Purchase Links:
As the plot thickens: Bean starts running into Zak in her trips to
the 19th century, where he totally does not belong.
Excerpt:
And then
something in the morning light dimmed—a cloud in front of the sun?
No. A
shadow. Someone else was in the church with her.
“Bean?” he said. “Hey, Bean. Behind you. Up here!”
That voice was familiar,
too—so much that it turned her heart inside-out. Bean spun around and looked up into the
heavily carved cherry pulpit where Lucia’s father gave his sermons each
Sunday. Grasping its edges was someone
with long, silver-blonde hair…wearing a purple and blue tie-dye t-shirt.
Zak.
Bean
gasped. This is wrong, she thought. This has to be wrong. But she ran to him anyway.
“Check it out!” he said,
leaning over the pulpit’s well-polished edge.
He leaned forward, caught her hands, and squeezed them. “Pretty bizarre,
huh?”
Bean
didn’t even know when she’d started to cry. Zak’s smile and his steel-blue eyes
blurred in her tears. Rules! she
thought. This is not okay. It isn’t.
She remembered Crow…and danger…but, no.
This was Zak! Zak, after
all this time, right in front of her, touching her, close enough to…close
enough to kiss, she thought, and felt the heat rising in her cheeks.
She couldn’t burden him with her
worries. She didn’t want to think about
them, herself. Gnats buzzed outside and the sun came in golden through the
stained glass windows.
“Oh, Zak! Oh, wow!” Bean said. Her voice sounded choked
and shaky in the reverberant church.
“Yeah,” said Zak. “Just look at you, woman!”
“You’re not really pissed-off
at me because…you know?”
He laughed. “It’s not nearly time
for that yet. You have to take the
manuscript first.”
“What?”
“Edwina’s manuscript. There on the organ. Go on.
Take it, woman. Your job is to
keep it safe,” he said. He bent further
over the pulpit until his face was next to hers. His lips were warm and dry on Bean’s forehead
when he kissed her. “Grab that
music.” She raised her face to kiss him
back properly…
…and
then she was standing in the cellar of a building that wasn’t there anymore,
looking up at a bright, cold sky above her.
Bean wondered for a minute if she’d fallen, but she hadn’t. No scrapes or bruises. Something that had been dead for a long time
was breathing again inside of her. She’d
seen Zak!
Guest
Post:
Bean Donohue’s World
The Bean Books are set in the early 1970’s, with time
travel to the 18th and 19th centuries—along with a few
side trips to the years just after World War and the early 1960’s.
When
I wrote the trilogy, I had to build a lot of worlds!
The early 1970’s were the easiest—and
most of the books are set there. Like my
main character Bean Donohue, I was in high school and college then, and like
her, I was a folk-rock musician who also DJ’d on radio. I remember the incredibly rich music scene
then well, and I draw on it a bunch in the books, especially in Bean Three, What Time Is It There? In that book,
Bean’s in college, the program director of her campus FM station. It was fun putting together this YouTube
playlist of all the great music that she gets to perform--or cue up for her
radio show: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAKQW65NESOHAQHHzi5hBs-C2BkswjgLX
Also, it was really wonderful
remembering the tone of the times. We
laughed a lot, but it wasn’t snarky humor.
It was mostly goofy stuff.
Although there was a draft that endangered young men, and a vicious war in Vietnam few
of us supported, the early 1970’s was really a sweet time. We believed that love could save the
world. (I still do, but I guess I’m just
an old hippie.) I wanted to offer that
part of Bean’s world to my readers.
But Bean Donohue is not just a
resident of the 1970’s; she is also a time traveler. She gets physically pulled back in time to
things she needs to understand. That’s
right: she simply disappears (makes social relationships a bit difficult
sometimes). So, to write Bean Three, What Time Is It There?, I had to also build
the world of Edwina Moreson-Bright, a late nineteenth century aspiring
composer.
Edwina is denied a proper musical education because
her family does not believe women deserve one, and dies tragically young. One of Bean’s tasks in all three books is to
figure out why she keeps getting called back to Edwina’s life, and why it’s
important to both of them. That meant a
lot of time researching what it would have been like to live in Edwina’s
time. I read and read about Victorian
ladies’ fashions, about how the house of a wealthy family of that time would
have been laid out, about what would have been gas-powered and what would have
been electric. (Edwina’s house, in New
York State’s Hudson River Valley, is still illuminated by gas.)
Another world I needed to build was a very dark one:
there just might be an actual demon in What
Time Is It There? Bean’s best friend
in college is a quirky guy named Amp—a God-obsessed hippie who is tested as
much as she is by the book’s climax.
Bean is going to need to lean on Amp’s faith! But are demons things that are summoned by
Tarot readings—or are they just a personification of the evil that exists in
everyone’s world? I read plenty about
exorcism, Tarot—and the cults of the 1960’s and 70’s. The world I built around those things ended
up surprising even me! (Hint: Tarot cards are fine!)
Welcome to Bean
Donohue’s World! I do hope you
enjoy the trip.
OTHER
BOOKS IN THE SERIES
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR
Christine
Potter is a writer and poet who lives in a very old (haunted) house on a creek
in Rockland County. She has an organist/choirdirector husband (Ken) and two
spoiled tom cats. One of the house's two ghosts lives in the room behind her
office.
Christine's
newest book is a YA time travel novel, What Time Is It There? (The Bean Books,
Book 3), newly released by Evernight Teen. The first book in the series is Time
Runs Away With Her, and the second is In Her Own Time.
Her
two poetry collections are Zero Degrees at First Light (2006) and Sheltering in
Place (2013). She has also had poems published in Rattle, Fugue, The Irish
Examiner, HOOT, Eclectica, and The Pedestal, among other magazines. Her third
book of poems, Unforgetting, is due out this spring from Kelsay Books.
Giveaway:
·
One (1) winner will receive a paperback copy of all
3 books in the series and a tie-dyed scarf (INT)
·
Two (2) winners will receive digital copies of all 3
books in the series (INT)
1 comments:
Sounds Like An Incredible Book.
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