The Journey, by John Marsden; Out of Time, by John Marsden

I usually like Marsden a lot but The Journey really didn’t play to his strengths. It’s an attempt to teach a lot of life lessons wrapped up in a story about a boy in a rather vague country with a tradition of adolescents going on a solo journey to become an adult. Argus’s journey is full of insights that do feel revelatory when you actually experience them, but fall flat when he just tells them.

He walks a lot, works for food, joins a traveling circus, has a first love, encounters birth and death, and returns home an adult, and it’s all remarkably boring. I think I would have liked it better if I’d read it when I was eleven or so, but I’m not sure I would have liked it a lot better.

The Journey



Out of Time is better-written and less preachy, but more frustrating. A boy named James who doesn’t speak due to some trauma gets hold of a time machine and uses it to make several journeys into the past, concluding with his own.

This story is interspersed with a whole bunch of others about other people in different time periods. As far as I could tell, only one of them intersects with James’ story in any direct manner. They mostly involve missing, mysterious, or displaced people. I could not for the life of me tell whether the other stories were supposed to have purely thematic resemblances to James’, or whether the people in them had also been switched around in time. James has a brief fantasy in the beginning of the book in which the latter happens, so maybe that but if so, I have no idea how or why. Maybe every time he uses his time machine, it displaces someone else??? (Wild guess, there’s nothing in the book to suggest this.) I was pretty baffled by the structure, and while James’ story has a resolution, most of the others don’t.

His final use of the time machine was also odd—( Read more... )

If anyone understood the book better than me, please explain it to me.

These are early books of his which seem fairly obscure, and I can see why. I’ve liked everything else I’ve read by him way better.

Out of Time

"Fogarty's Cove" comes across very differently if you have electric coils

Poll #20813

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 113

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If someone is described as having "eyes like the top of a stove," their eyes are...

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Orange, like a flame.
20 (17.7%)

Blue, like a flame.
12 (10.6%)

Green, like a flame.
0 (0.0%)

Red, like electric coil burners.
32 (28.3%)

Black, like iron
36 (31.9%)

Silver, like steel
1 (0.9%)

White, like enamel
5 (4.4%)

Some other color related to the top of a stove
7 (6.2%)