Running Out of Time

A novel twist on historical fiction with some interesting ideas, Running Out of Time eventually runs out of steam

Thirteen-year-old Jessie Keyser and her brothers and sisters live in the frontier town of Clifton, Indiana. Her pa is the village blacksmith and her ma the midwife—both important jobs. Clifton is the only home Jessie has ever known—she isn't old enough to remember when Pa and Ma and her older sister, Hannah, first arrived from Pennsylvania on a flatboat—but she likes it well enough.

Suddenly, though, things begin to change. Ma is called to assist the ill in the dead of night. Children begin to go missing from school. The town of Clifton has diphtheria, and in a desperate bid to save the lives of the sick children, Jessie's ma breaks her vow and tells her daughter the truth—the year is not 1840, but 1996.

Clifton Village is a historical preserve like Colonial Williamsburg, but with a twist. Instead of putting on a show for tourists, the villagers of Clifton live there year-round, showing the world a glimpse of the nineteenth century through hidden closed-circuit cameras. The younger children are not even aware their world is an elaborate form of make-believe. But Mrs. Keyser realizes something has gone wrong when the doctor stops slipping them pills to cure their illnesses. Using the modern clothes she saved from the days before Clifton was founded, she spirits Jessie out into the real world to fetch help.

The scenes with Jessie in the modern world are intriguing, as she first sees her village from the point of view of outsiders and then attempts to escape the Clifton Village complex. Some of the simplest aspects of modern life—knowing the value of money, recognizing a car, understanding how a radio works, using a telephone—are frustrating and challenging to her. Several times her speech patterns nearly give her away. Her attitudes are also very nineteenth-century—she can't help feeling that moving so fast in a car is unnatural, and at one point she meets a girl about her age whom she mentally identifies as "a Negro."

Author Margaret Peterson Haddix has come up with a unique premise in Running Out of Time, and the book attempts to answer some interesting questions: what if one could create a completely closed "historical preserve," like an island in the sea of time? What would it be like for the people who lived there? How would a child from such a preserve handle an experience in the modern world? Unfortunately, it also asks the question: What if the owners of the preserve tried to perform experiments on the people living inside? The inherent paranoia in this question fuels much of the tension of the book, as Jessie tries to decide whom she can trust, but it also requires a big leap of faith on the reader's part.

As the book progresses, the paranoia thickens. Jessie finds herself embroiled in a conspiracy theory thick enough to have been dreamed up by Oliver Stone himself. Indeed, at times it gets a little too thick for my taste. Since we see through Jessie's eyes and she has such a fragmented understanding of the modern world, we never do get a complete picture of what happened, although a friendly reporter provides a lot of handy exposition near the end of the book. Too, there is no clearly happy ending for Jessie—there's always that niggling feeling in the back of the reader's head that in leaving Clifton, even if she manages to get help in time, Jessie has left a world behind. It gives new meaning to the phrase "You can't go home again."

Running Out of Time is a novel mixture of historical fiction, science fiction and thriller that begins well and will keep readers turning the pages. In the end, though, the tortured conspiracy weighs this book down, making it merely good instead of great.

All material displayed on this website is © 2001-2009 by S. B. Houghton, writing under the alias "The Pirate King." All rights reserved.
Don't be pinchin' me stuff! To quote reviews or purchase reprint rights, .