Review: Together Again for the First Time!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 12 11, 2011
When the nerdy Wren Prenderson stumbles across an ancient Welsh diary that purports to give the location of a treasure that's been lost for almost nine centuries, he decides to go and get it. If it ever existed in the first place, that is. But the bad guys have a piece of the puzzle as well, and go to the extent of trying to torture the rest of it out of the boy.After Wren enlists his cousin, Rhyllann Jones, to help him escape from the hospital and go after the treasure, the game begins in earnest, culminating in a chase across the moors of Cornwall that I found eerily evocative of The Hound Of The Baskervilles. Whether it was worth it in the end, you'll naturally have to see for yourselves.A Raucous Time (the title is an inside joke) is Ms. Hughes's second published novel, though this story predates the Celtic Cousins adventure A Ripple In Time. If you liked that one, you'll like this one, too. If you haven't read "Ripple" yet, you should--but it's not a prerequisite to reading "Raucous."Ms. Hughes's engaging style carries the reader along swiftly--so swiftly, in fact, that if you get caught up in the current, you're in danger of missing something important. Every scene, no matter how seemingly mundane, contributes to the tale, and if, like me, you tend to skim at times, you do so at your peril. Take your time with this one. I think that when you're done, you'll agree with me that it was time well spent.[Note: Americans who aren't Anglophiles may have some trouble with the British/Welsh terminology (natural to expect to encounter that, since the author's British and the main characters are Welsh), but perspicacious readers should be able to pick up enough context clues to get through without any problem. As with any self-published effort, it's impossible to get everything perfect with respect to the formatting: there are a (very) few minor glitches, primarily in paragraph indentation. "It's" and "its" have been reversed in a couple of places, and Ms. Hughes's method of dialogue attribution ("Here is some dialogue attribution." He said.), though widely used, isn't what I'm used to seeing. I mention these things only in the name of full disclosure. They do not affect the pacing or interfere with the storytelling, for which my friend Julia has a natural and undisputed gift.]