A TIME APART

Her mother’s cancer surgery and anticipated follow-up treatment is the catalyst for Ginny’s trip to England, where she will live with her professor father, Hugh; she hasn’t seen him in a year, and hasn’t lived with him since her parents divorced. Ginny expects to be roughing it with Hugh on some kind of camping trip, but it turns out that Hugh is the leader of an experimental archaeology project; he and several others have re-created an Iron Age village and attempt to live as the villagers would have, growing their food, making tools and clothes, and sleeping in rudimentary shelters. Ginny is appalled at first but soon enters into the rhythms of the days there. Readers will be fascinated by the details of life there, but Stanley’s first novel begins to labor when Ginny runs away. Dirty, dressed in her Iron Age clothing, shoeless, and moneyless, Ginny finds her way to Hugh’s London home, and uses one of his credit cards to book a flight. Hugh locates her in Houston, and escorts her back to the settlement to finish out her stay while her mother continues to recover. The specifics of the Iron Age experiment are compelling, but the ending, as hasty in its pacing as the set-up was leisurely, is disappointingly feeble. (Fiction. 11- 14)