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I got this book randomly from a second hand shop, I really enjoyed the story and the characters.
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Huck & Her Time Machine
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When Huck's brother Barty brings home a contraption from the waste tip Huck is sure it's a Time Machine. Huck's family are a trial to her so she hopes she can send them back in time and return them again more livable-with!
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Genres
childrens
192 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1,1977
This edition
- Format
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192 pages, Hardcover
- Published
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January 1, 1977 by Collins
- ISBN
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9780001847750
- ASIN
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0001847759
- Language
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English
About the author
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Gillian Elise Avery was a British children's novelist, and a historian of childhood education and children's literature. She won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize in 1972 for A Likely Lad. It was adapted for television in 1990.
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Cute
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One of the cleverest children's books I have read in some time.
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From cover to set-up Huck and Her Time Machine by Gillian Avery is the most 1977 thing there ever could be. Forget time machines, reading this was like walking into the past.
‘Huck’ Huxtable is a member of a famously dysfunctional family. Her Easter holiday started with them finding a note from their mum telling them that she’s gone to America to protest rainforests and that there is money in the soup tureen. The Huxtables are the ultimate latch-key kids, with no one but the friendly policeman Jumbo to check on how they are doing.
Huck is a brilliantly drawn character, a bookworm and inveterate storyteller/liar, she’s also a scrapper with her signature move of running into an opponent with her head lowered. Her twin brother draws machines and is the most quiet of the family. The middle brother is a tease and a smart mouth, the oldest sister supports causes and pickets prisons and the oldest brother is interested in archeology and cricket but doesn’t notice anything else. Everything about the family is boldly drawn, with their outsized personalities and the reactions that the rest of the town has to them.
For me, the problems with the book started with the introduction of the time machine. Despite the title, it’s actually her twin brother Barty who finds the time machine and although Huck goes on time travel adventures, the reader is locked into Barty’s point of view - he is actually the main character. This makes this a time-travel book where all the time travel happens off the page.
Huck’s travels in time are to ‘fix’ her family, to take the members that are annoying her back in time so they can learn a lesson. Unfortunately, those members become possessed by the personality of someone from the family tree and these new personalities are more anti-social than the ones we started with. There’s lots of running about and the book ends with a chase where the time machine is broken and everything is put back as it was.
Actually, it’s explained away that Barty has imagined the last few days and that the whole thing is a story of Huck’s, the other siblings changes of personality being explained away by other things. Presumably that’s why the reader never got to join the characters back in time because it didn’t actually happen but it seems that it definitely did. Apart from anything else, why was the oddball acquaintance of the older brother, Steve hanging outside the house if he wasn’t obsessed by the time machine? Incidentally Steve was a really off-putting character, an oddball nerd who finds himself turned into Gollum by the end.
Ultimately, this book didn’t satisfy. I found the new ‘possessed’ Huxtables too irritating and the logic of the book too ropey. It may have been a better book without time-travel and allowing these interesting characters work through their problems together.
‘Huck’ Huxtable is a member of a famously dysfunctional family. Her Easter holiday started with them finding a note from their mum telling them that she’s gone to America to protest rainforests and that there is money in the soup tureen. The Huxtables are the ultimate latch-key kids, with no one but the friendly policeman Jumbo to check on how they are doing.
Huck is a brilliantly drawn character, a bookworm and inveterate storyteller/liar, she’s also a scrapper with her signature move of running into an opponent with her head lowered. Her twin brother draws machines and is the most quiet of the family. The middle brother is a tease and a smart mouth, the oldest sister supports causes and pickets prisons and the oldest brother is interested in archeology and cricket but doesn’t notice anything else. Everything about the family is boldly drawn, with their outsized personalities and the reactions that the rest of the town has to them.
For me, the problems with the book started with the introduction of the time machine. Despite the title, it’s actually her twin brother Barty who finds the time machine and although Huck goes on time travel adventures, the reader is locked into Barty’s point of view - he is actually the main character. This makes this a time-travel book where all the time travel happens off the page.
Huck’s travels in time are to ‘fix’ her family, to take the members that are annoying her back in time so they can learn a lesson. Unfortunately, those members become possessed by the personality of someone from the family tree and these new personalities are more anti-social than the ones we started with. There’s lots of running about and the book ends with a chase where the time machine is broken and everything is put back as it was.
Actually, it’s explained away that Barty has imagined the last few days and that the whole thing is a story of Huck’s, the other siblings changes of personality being explained away by other things. Presumably that’s why the reader never got to join the characters back in time because it didn’t actually happen but it seems that it definitely did. Apart from anything else, why was the oddball acquaintance of the older brother, Steve hanging outside the house if he wasn’t obsessed by the time machine? Incidentally Steve was a really off-putting character, an oddball nerd who finds himself turned into Gollum by the end.
Ultimately, this book didn’t satisfy. I found the new ‘possessed’ Huxtables too irritating and the logic of the book too ropey. It may have been a better book without time-travel and allowing these interesting characters work through their problems together.
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I bought my copy of this book when I was about 10, a year or so after it was published. It cost me 65p of my very own money. The characters have lurked in the 1980s part of my brain ever since along with the clear memory of actually browsing the book shop shelves and choosing a book all by myself for what I think was the very first time. My parents were in another part of the bookshop just letting me get on with it. And it's only now, as I write this, that I realise how significant that episode was and how wonderful my parents were for giving it to me.
Anyway.... I decided to re-read having just read 'Time Travelling with a Hamster' (Ross Welford) - that story has lovely links with H. G. Wells' 'The Time Machine' but 'Huck...' makes direct reference to it. I couldn't ignore Huck's cries of 'read me! Read ME!' from the shelf!
It's so interesting to read a story that's set in the late 70s, the setting of my own childhood; no mobile phones, no computers, no internet, no massive supermarkets, limited TV... and 5 siblings left to their own devices (under the watchful eye of the local police who are used to this arrangement) in the Easter holidays by their hippy mother who's off to support some international social justice cause or other.
The two youngest siblings, twins Huck and Barty, find a time machine, take it home and transport their older brothers and sister back in time where they acquire the personalities of relatives from way back in the family tree.
I loved it when I was 10; I still love it now I'm a lot older than that.
Anyway.... I decided to re-read having just read 'Time Travelling with a Hamster' (Ross Welford) - that story has lovely links with H. G. Wells' 'The Time Machine' but 'Huck...' makes direct reference to it. I couldn't ignore Huck's cries of 'read me! Read ME!' from the shelf!
It's so interesting to read a story that's set in the late 70s, the setting of my own childhood; no mobile phones, no computers, no internet, no massive supermarkets, limited TV... and 5 siblings left to their own devices (under the watchful eye of the local police who are used to this arrangement) in the Easter holidays by their hippy mother who's off to support some international social justice cause or other.
The two youngest siblings, twins Huck and Barty, find a time machine, take it home and transport their older brothers and sister back in time where they acquire the personalities of relatives from way back in the family tree.
I loved it when I was 10; I still love it now I'm a lot older than that.
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