Out of Time

by John Marsden

James reads by his open bedroom window at night. Other lives and other worlds beckon. One of these worlds is conjured by old Mr Woodford, a physicist who looks more like an accountant and who constructs a strange black box.One day when James slips into the laboratory, he makes a dreadful discovery and learns to master a great power.

Who is the little boy in Mexico who scratches pictures of aeroplanes in the dust? How will the girl caught in a wartime bomb blast be reunited with her parents? And why does James sit alone in his island of silence?

With Out of Time John Marsden has produced a novel that will further enhance his reputation as one of the most successful writers of fiction for teenagers. This is a challenging novel which poses a new question on every page as it draws us into an ever-widening series of mysteries, into magical, dangerous worlds–in and out of time.

Genres: Young Adult, Fiction, Fantasy, Time Travel, Science Fiction

139 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

There is more than one author with this name in the database, see f.e. John Marsden.

John Marsden was an Australian writer and school principal. He wrote more than 40 books in his career and his books have been translated into many languages. He was especially known for his young adult novel Tomorrow, When the War Began, which began a series of seven books.
Marsden began writing for children while working as a teacher, and had his first book, So Much to Tell You, published in 1987. In 2006, he started an alternative school, Candlebark School, and reduced his writing to focus on teaching and running the school. In 2016, he opened the arts-focused secondary school, Alice Miller School. Both schools are in the Macedon Ranges.

Reviews

[Aelvana · Rating 1 out of 5]

Normally I would put a summary here of the plot, but I'm going to skip that for this book, because as far as I could tell, it had no plot. You may ask, then, what exactly he did in 127 pages. Most of it was vignettes of various children from previous times, with perhaps 10% of the book following a quiet kid named James who got hold of this time travel device. Forget science fiction---this book hardly falls under real fiction.

If I wanted to be kind, I would say I think the author was trying to show various pictures of kids who were alone, most of them suffering from something they couldn't prevent, and most of them similar in character to James. This would have worked a lot better if more than one of them actually met James. The vast majority showed up for about one to two pages, gave their entire life history, and were never seen again.

As a science-fiction novel, it's even worse. The time travel device is, of course, a handheld remote about the size of my graphing calculator. Nothing is ever said about how it works, although James picks up an article at the beginning which hints it has something to do with white and black holes being joined together to form wormholes. This is a theory I am perfectly willing to pursue, but I must ask why none of the practical questions of a *HANDHELD* black-hole generator have been solved. It runs on an infinite energy battery (no, I'm not kidding), yet this wonderful source of power, despite being well known to the only other person who sees it, is not in widespread use. The author is very careful, in fact, to avoid even naming his source of power. I think this is because he realized how weak his science was.

And for a novel supposedly about time traveling, James does very little of it. Most of his trips are over in under 5 minutes. The remaining ones he hardly does anything either.

I'm glad I got this short book done over lunch break, because it wasn't worth wasting an evening on, and it's certainly not worth reading again. Not Recommended.

[Angela Sunshine · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was an extremely difficult book for me to finish. I like the general idea of it.. time travel... but it just didn't seem to come together the way the author envisioned it. The narrator shifted frequently, without warning or a distinguishing voice and left me scratching my head wondering how it fit in. Unfortunately, I never saw the whole story really pull together.

[Dale · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have no idea what happened in this book :/. There seemed to be some sort of plot about a time traveller, along with three other plots unrelated. Who knows!

[Connor Cuevo · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book makes little to no sense. It quite literally, jumps in and out of time and this can be quite frustrating for someone with any sense of coherence. The characters are poorly developed, and many details are withheld and withdrawn without explanation. Many important revelations of the story aren’t dealt with in the exposition at all and this complicates the story when they are revealed. The ending doesn’t make any sense, the dialogue is hackneyed and hard to grasp. It’s sometimes hard to tell who is speaking. Most of all the setting is very ambiguous, and there is almost no exposition there. Really shouldn’t have been published; stick to marsden’s other works.

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not quite sure what happened with some of the people in this book, but the overall story is really sad. Some terrible parenting examples always blaming the older child for not looking after the younger one properly and yet the parents don't look after her themselves and prefer to be out having fun with their friends. If you choose to have children only you are responsible for looking after them, not your other children (who you also don't pay any attention to). Do not breed if you don't want to look after or spend time with your children.

[Sarah Thornton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Was looking forward to a time travel story but just got a boy who seemed mildly autistic with terrible parents and some half-expressed ideas about possibilities.
Fragmented with too little information between fragments.

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bit heavy for a kid's book, but still dressed as one

Kampuchean - Cambodian

[Sammy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Out Of Time is about a boy called James who gets his hands on a time travel device shaped like a calculator. That's about it.

Really. 144 pages and nothing really happens James uses it haphazardly, almost going back in time to the Aztecs (or was it another civilization? It really doesn't matter) almost getting killed, another time just transporting him to the middle of the ocean because he did not care to look up the coordinates. The only good thing he uses the limited use device for, is finding a missing child's parents after a recent presumed terrorist attack. Near the end, James' sister dies (presumably due to an asthma attack, suffocating in her bed) while he was meant to look after her. The device though is all drained from its power after James' misuse, so he cannot go back in time to stop her from dying. He doesn't even seem to react to her death.

That's the thing with James as a protagonist. He has zero reaction to what's happening around him. Is he scared? Is he sad? Is he happy? We don't know - we have no idea what he's thinking when he reunites a girl with her lost parents, or when his sister dies, or when he almost dies in the hospital. We don't even know what he thinks of the time travelling device. There is a line of 'oh dear I think he's getting worse' from his parents, but it doesn't tell us anything about his mental state and is never brought up again. James almost seems to be autistic in some way - he has trouble interacting with other children as well as not understanding other people, but its never explicitly stated.

Other characters hardly spend any time on, like James' parents and sister. We even get random insertions of children and their stories, but they go nowhere and are never revisited again. They honestly seem a lot more interesting than what's happening with James. Mr Woodforde is also introduced to us in the beginning as the creator of the time travel device - but is swiftly killed off, giving us no reason for his death.

Other than the characters and story, the writing can be a bit janky sometimes. Marsden switches between 1st and 3rd point of views seemingly out of nowhere, but other than that it's rather average.

Overall, there is hardly any plot and the MC seems rather alien.

Rating: 3/10

[Karissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not quite sure what to say about this novella. It was very well written. But it was more of a collection of short stories that were loosely tied together than an actual novel.

James is a quiet boy who has befriended an old physicist. When James inherits a time machine he begins to travel through time only to find out it's not all it's really cut out to be. This is woven with the story of a girl who was knocked out during a bombing and has lost her family. These two stories are constantly interrupted by other brief stories. The only thing they all have in common is that the people aren't where they should be or don't know where they should be. I was not sure where the other brief stories came from; I think they are stories that James read, although they could have been things James experienced.

If the above sounds kind of confusing, well it was. The writing itself was exceptional and even the briefest of stories drew you in and developed the characters in great depth. The way the story was put together was confusing, and the constant interruption of the main story with unrelated side stories, made the whole book seem a bit schizophrenic. Trying to figure out what was going on as I read the book was difficult, I finally just decided to enjoy reading the stories for what they were individually and trust that everything would come together and make sense in the end. Well, my trust was misplaced. Some of the things made sense, while others were left dangling. At one point James' sister herself is reading a Book of Unfinished Tales, where the stories are left dangling with apparently no meaning. I almost felt like Marsden added this part to excuse his own collection of dangling stories.

So while this was an intriguing and well-written book; I thought it was organized poorly and kind of only got halfway to where it was trying to go. It is a slow and meandering read, although the book itself is very short. The writing was good enough I might check out some of Marsden's earlier books; I wouldn't really recommend this book though.

[Hannah Perry · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was optimistic going into this book. I had pulled it randomly off of the library book shelf because of its size, but I had really wanted to like it after I read the description. Oh, by that just wasn't the case.

I feel like I got the fist half of the book, like someone just forgot to include the second half. There were multiple scenes from different points of view outside the main storyline, and though I didn't understand how any of them tied into James's story I was hopeful that they would all be tied in by the end of the book, that his purpose in traveling through time would make sense, that all of my questions would be answered in some spectacular conclusion. That didn't happen. It's not that my questions just weren't answered in the conclusion, I feel like there was no conclusion.

The book wasn't winding down in the last quarter, questions weren't being answered. More were popping up. It's like the story still had more to tell, but it wasn't allowed.

I had been hopeful about this book, even though I had begun to feel a little wary after seeing its average rating. Turns out the low ratings were warranted.

The books only saving grace is the liking I took to James. His character was a mystery. I didn't understand his motivations or what drove him, but I liked him anyway. I'm disappointed I'll never get to understand him.

[Sarah Sammis · Rating 1 out of 5]

James has a lot of time on his hands. His parents are busy either with work or their social life. He seems to live on or near a military base and he has access to a lab where his old friend Dr. Woodforde has been developing a time machine.

As with so many time travel novels, Out of Time has to be carried on the strength and likeability of its main character. Unfortunately for Out of Time James keeps to himself. He doesn't even share his thoughts with the readers leaving only descriptions of what he's doing and where he's going.

What's left in place of dialogue (internal or external) is "artful" description (as Laura calls it in her review). The artfulness though leaves everything too ambiguous for me. When my husband asked me to describe the book I called it "an attempt at Picnic at Hanging Rock with time travel."

I realize that the Dreamtime is a popular (dominant?) theme in Australian literature and there's a hint of that in Out of Time but it just doesn't gel. James needs to be a more engaging character for it to work.

[Hollowspine · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very short and somewhat disconnected narrative about suffering and hope. It took me a quite a few pages to get 'into' the story, the narrative jumps around through time, location and narrative quite a bit, but eventually the jist of the story emerges and proves to be fairly engrossing and in the end very sad.

I did feel that there were many side stories and descriptions of characters that, although adding to the hopeless feel of the story, did not seem to fit with the rest of the book. Some of the sections did eventually become woven into the larger story, which made the sections that did not stick out even more.

In the end I felt that the overarching message of the story was that you can't change the past. Even if you have a time machine. It was rather hopeless, but a haunting story.

[A.B. Shepherd · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book very confusing. There are a series of what are basically short stories throughout the book, that I don't quite see how relate to the main story, with the exception of the one about the little girl in the war. I'm uncertain whether James was really time traveling or if this was some psychosis due to the loss of his sister. I'm unclear whether there really even was a physicist. It's all about as clear as mud to me.

The back cover of the novel asks the question "who is the little boy in Mexico who scratches pictures of aeroplanes in the dust?" The novel doesn't even give us the answer to that.

I didn't really enjoy so many things being left unexplained. I prefer the author to bring me to some conclusion.

[Lindsey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Creepy and somewhat confusing. I'm not entirely sure what to make of it all, especially the little side stories thrown in throughout the novella. Are those children time travelers? I think that's what the book attempts to suggest; that the explanation for the disappearances is time travel. It's definitely a story that makes you think ...but the thoughts are mostly sad and unsettling o_O

Also ... I wonder if James' sister being named Ellie was on purpose or what. I don't think this story has any direct connection to TWTWB, but still it was an interesting choice of name.

[Kady · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book to be a unique read. I wouldn't really call this a time travel book. The writing is beautiful but the structure of the book is confusing at times. The author jumps point of view and includes small scenes that feel random sometimes as you try to place them into the context of James' story. Though those stories weren't ever fully explained James' difficultly came to a end in way that left me satisfied.

[Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very disjointed text. No chapters. Just a series of texts from a page to a few pages. Some about the main character. Others about others seemingly not closely related or even related at all. Still a story is told, even if it isn't very happy or if there is, in my opinion, not sufficient character development.

[Allison · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was very nearly fantastic, but I felt like the disparate chapters needed a bit more linking together - anyone can write a bunch of beautiful, gem-like little set pieces, but in just leaving some of them unexplained he may have been trying to seem clever, but just seemed lazy.

[Lindsay · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've always found this series very powerful, particularly the earlier books. The characters are well developed, and continue to change from their experiences, and the events scarily believable.

[Jocelyn · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is extremely confusing as it constantly shifts characters and narrators. It appears to be more like a series of vignettes than a novel.

[Liz]

Have I read this? I think so...

[C.O. Bonham · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was OK but I think that the plot line could have flowed better than it did. I also thought that the over all tone of the book was a little depressing.

[tereseh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weird book. Although well written, it's as if some pages are missing. Or it might be that I read it too fast. I think I need to read it again.

[Wendy Holliday]

I don't get this book, and can't finish it ... and that's saying something. It's only 127 pages.

[Shannon · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't get it.

[Kari Scare · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good writing & description but confusing. Not sure how or even if all the stories connect. Have guesses but would like to have them connected at the end.