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Summary
Summary
While exploring The Treasure Chest, Felix and Maisie are transported to a Massachusetts farm in 1836. Disappointed that they have not landed in their beloved New York City, they wonder why they were brought to Massachusetts to meet a young girl named Clara Barton. Perhaps Clara has a message for the twins? Or maybe they have one for her?
Author Notes
Ann Hood was born on December 9, 1956, in West Warwick, R.I. She attended the University of Rhode Island and New York University. For several years, she worked as a flight attendant before pursuing her dream of becoming a writer.
Ann Hood had a dream of writing ever since her first "novel" at the age of 11. It was not until 1987, with the publication of Somewhere off the Coast of Maine that she received the recognition she had been longing for. Set in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s, the story deals with the lives of three women of the Vietnam era and their children. Strong on emotion and personal growth, Hood's writing frequently examines the intricacies of various levels of relationships. Other works include Something Blue, which also involves the association between three friends.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Adult author Hood's first middle-grade offering launches the planned eight-book Treasure Chest series, which has 12-year-old twins Maisie and Felix Robbins traveling through time to meet iconic American figures from centuries past. Unhappy about moving from their New York City apartment to their ailing great-aunt's mansion in Newport, R.I., the twins, who are still reeling from their parents' recent divorce, make the best of it by exploring their new home, discovering hints of magic as they do. In a room called the Treasure Chest, filled with collected odds and ends of every variety, Maisie and Felix inadvertently travel back to 1836 Massachusetts, where they befriend a teenage Clara Barton (who would go on to organize the Red Cross), before learning how to return home-and perhaps even helping history along a bit. The twins' personalities (and their historical ignorance) are believable, and there's a strong, nostalgic sense of the push and pull between past and present woven throughout. While Maisie and Felix's mother often encourages them to "Stop dwelling on the past," they can't help but be drawn to a time-before the move, before the divorce-when things seemed better. Ages 8-12. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
Twins Maisie and Felix discover a hidden room filled with historical artifacts. Touching a letter addressed to American Red Cross founder Clara Barton transports them to 1836, where they meet the fourteen-year-old future "Angel of the Battlefield." Inconsistent time-travel logic and scant information on the real-life Barton make the twins' journey feel purposeless. An appended biographical note fills in some details. (c) Copyright 2012. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
This homage to the Bobbs-Merrill Childhood of Famous Americans series of highly fictionalized biographies falls flat. (map, historical note) (Fiction. 8-12) ]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
ORPHANING a protagonist adds a note of plangent depth to a child's tale, provides a motive for search or for revenge, and hustles meddling authority figures out of the way. Ann Hood, the author of novels for adults like "The Knitting Circle" and "The Red Thread," updates this grisly fairy-tale motif by divorcing the parents of Maisie and Felix Robbins, the 12-year-old twins at the center of her new chapter book for children. In "Angel of the Battlefield," the mother is not deceased but simply distracted, settling herself and the children in a new home and proving herself in a new job. Their father has not been killed in battle nor lost to the exploration of faraway lands. He's a curator who has taken a position at a museum in Qatar. This canny tweak on a familiar convention is typical of Hood's delightful book, which manages to preserve the charms of an old-fashioned yarn while nimbly bringing its story up to date. "Angel of the Battlefield," the first of a projected series about time-traveling visits with famous American figures, features many of the elements adults will fondly recall from their own juvenile reading: a creaky old mansion, a hidden staircase, a room filled with mysterious objects. The emotional dynamics between the characters are also reassuringly recognizable: one twin is bold and impetuous, recklessly rushing forward, while the other is timid and cautious, always raising red flags. In Hood's satisfying twist it's the girl, Maisie, who is the heedless one, dealing with her grief over her parents' separation by trying something, anything, new. Felix remains rooted in nostalgia for the life he knew before their parents' split, before their move out of New York and into the top-floor apartment of a Rhode Island manor. In push-me, pull-you fashion, the twins set out to explore the secrets of their imposing new home one night while their mother slumbers, oblivious as ever. Lowering themselves from their attic quarters in a dumbwaiter maneuver straight out of "Nancy Drew," Maisie and Felix find their way to the Treasure Chest, a room piled high with wondrous artifacts. The two seize on a mysterious old scroll and, with a bit of authorial hocus-pocus, find themselves transported to a farm in Massachusetts. They land, quite literally, in the barn of a spirited and intelligent young woman, Clara Barton, who accepts their appearance with impressive composure. The details of the unfamiliar world in which Maisie and Felix find themselves - like the startling freshness of the air and the water, and the gaminess of the lamb Clara brings them to eat - are sharply sketched, and it's enjoyable to watch the truth dawn on the twins that they're not only in a different state, but in a different century: in 1836, to be exact. Still, the time-travel section of the book is a bit dull. Clara is unrelieyedly admirable, treating Felix's arm (injured in the bumpy transition from the 21st century) with a poultice and gamely learning how to play baseball. Hood quickly brings the episode to a close, as if recognizing that in stories like hers, dwelling in the destination is never as much fun as the getting there. Hood gives us new insight into the appeal of time travel. Its attraction lies not simply in the urge to explore other eras, but to escape from our present, with all its sorrows and complications. By tampering with a force as profound as time, we'll surely wreak a change in ourselves or our circumstances. But that hope is bound to be dashed; only the date has changed, and so the time travelers return, chastened, to their old place on the calendar. The ache of missing their father has followed Maisie and Felix to Clara Barton's farm. Once returned (Mom, of course, has noticed nothing), Maisie and Felix look up books about Barton at the library. Reading about her service on the battlefield and her founding of the American Red Cross, they're awed by the heroic figure their young friend became. In truth, the drama of their contemporary lives is more compelling to them and to the reader, as it should be. Like the book itself, the twins take a longing look back into the past with their feet planted firmly in the present. Annie Murphy Paul, the author of "Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives," is writing a book about the science of learning.
