LitPick Review
After the recent "Fruit Salad Mass," at which the evilpriest Drogo was exposed as the villain who had killed Eleanora de Narbonne more than a decade ago, Eloise andTommy are forced to flee the sixteenth century and the clutches of Drogo 's brother, the Bishop of Toulouse. They escape back to Tommy's time through the etching that had originally taken him into the past, and instantly Eloise is shocked by the culture change. She cannot understand a world where all people are equal, capital punishment is illegal, and girls wear almost nothing. But it isn't as if she has time to appreciate the good things about modern life, for Drogo has chased them through time and will stop at nothing to see Tommy and Eloise murdered. When Eloise is sucked back through time by Drogo's tricks and imprisoned in a nunnery by her own relatives, Tommy must also find a way back to rescue his love and capture Drogo. Knowing Tommy and Eloise,though, it shouldn't be too hard-- after all, they still have Tommy's beloved mobile phone for contact with the future, along with all of the friends that they had made onTommy's first trip to the past.
Opinion:
David Field's second book in the "Friends and Enemies"series, while worlds improved over the first, still leaves much to be desired. His characters, Eloise especially, are incredibly cliched, too perfect to be at all believable or even likable, and the setting, certainly in one of history's more interesting periods, is not in fact entirely historically accurate. All of the characters speak in the same voices, complete with twentieth century slang, and the varying castes can only be differed from one another interms of dialect. These weaknesses cause the plot, which, if pulled off accurately, could have been incredibly intriguing, to fall flat and become not only predictable but also uneventful, because as a reader I could not sympathize at all with the characters. This book's only true strength was in its writing style, which pulls off a third person omniscient point of view better than any book I've read in the past. In fact, at times it was only reading from inside the minds of certain lesser characters that kept me set on finishing this book, along with Field's beautiful descriptions from time to time. Indeed, once the author masters dialogue and characterization, his books will certainly rank with some of the better in young adult literature. Until then, though, the "Friends and Enemies"series might be better left unread, for fear of discouraging Field's potential readers.
