Non-Stop Reads: 06/04/13

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Orangeberry Newbie - Time and Space by Shireen Jeejeebhoy

Time is kidnapped by three boys from the future, then dumped in the future past to die. She finds shelter with a mysterious man whose name is Space, and she must either adapt or find her way home before the boys catch her and dispose of her forever.

“I am reading Time and Space by @ShireenJ and loving it! What a great writer!” – @Mariam_Kobras, 26 May 2013

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Time is turning 40. But as she does every day of the week, she is on her way to her safe, boring job in the city, never thinking she is about to be yanked into a different space and time. Three boys grab her in broad daylight, pull her into a shiny cube, and take her to their present: a lab in future Toronto. Their prof is not amused. The boys had promised never again to kidnap people from the past, he reminds them. He orders them to leave her where they took the others: her future, their past. The Nasty Time, they call it.

But while they leave her alone in order to prep the cube, bikini girl slips in, instructs Time against her will on how to build a time machine to get back home, and hides just as the boys and prof return. But it’s all gibberish to Time, and she doesn’t want to learn anything about time travel . . . until the boys dump her in The Nasty Time. It’s 2411. She’s still turning 40. She wants to go home. But she can only do so if she learns to believe in herself.

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Genre – Science Fiction / Time Travel

Rating – PG13

More details about the author

Connect with Shireen Jeejeebhoy on Facebook & Twitter

Website http://jeejeebhoy.ca/

Orangeberry Book of the Day - Gabriela and the Widow by Jack Remick

Chapter One

And She Left the Dying World

The year the war ended, Gabriela led her sick mother out of Tepeñixtlahuaca. The bones of the villagers still had meat on them then, and the hearths still had fire in them, but the retreating soldiers had chased away the skinny dogs and burned the houses. Scattered in the jungle, the bodies of young women—always the first to pay—had been left to rot. The young men had been killed or turned into soldiers who had, in their own time, committed atrocities.

The path down off the mountain to Paso de la Reina was stony and hard. The journey took eight hours. Gabriela had walked it only three times in her fourteen years, but this time she had the feeling that it would not end well because every few meters along the way, she caught sight of jungle toads staring at her. They were giants, their gray-green bodies covered with warts, their bellies white as cotton. One of them flicked his tongue at Gabriela. When she saw a toad eating a small bird she knew that her mother would not live to see the doctor in Jamiltepec.

At the edge of Paso de la Reina, in sight of the huts and houses and the Rio Verde, her mother begged for a longer rest. Gabriela sat her on a large stone alongside the path in the evening light and there her mother died.

With no one to help her and no one to keep her dead mother company or tell her what to do, Gabriela waited on the path until morning. The men of Paso de la Reina went to work in the fields and the women, on their way to chores, stopped to tell her that she was in luck: the priest—who came once a year to baptize babies, to marry the young, to bless the already interred and to shrive the dying—was in the village.

The priest came and blessed the dead mother. Handing Gabriela a stake, he told her to bury her mother in the red earth beside the path.

With the stake she dug a grave. Not a deep grave but deep enough. She wrapped her mother in the two handwoven huipiles, one dyed deep blue, the other crimson—the only objects her mother had salvaged from the ruins—and buried the body.

At fourteen, she was alone. Her village no longer existed. Her mother was dead. Her murdered father had left a Bible that the soldiers had torn apart, burned, then pissed on, along with a small cache of coins that the soldiers stole before leaving the village to the dead. She was alone and she did not know what to do and she had no place to go.

The priest, a man weary of death but not unhappy to send souls to heaven, told Gabriela that God would provide for her.