FROM AMAZON: In the 21st-century Kingdom of Versailles, the roads are terrible and Paris is a dirty little town. Serfdom and slavery are both common, and no one thinks that's wrong. Why should they? Most people spend their lives doing backbreaking farm work anyway.

But teenaged Khadija, daughter of a prosperous family of Moorish business travellers, is unfazed. That's because Khadija is really Annette Klein from 21st-century California, and her whole family are secret agents of Crosstime Traffic, trading for commodities to send back to our own timeline. Now it's time for Annette and her family to go home for the start of another school year, so they join a pack train bound for their home base in Marseilles, where the crosstime portal is hidden.

Then bandits attack while they're crossing the Pyrenees. Annette/Khadija is separated from her parents and knocked out, and wakes up to find herself a captive in a caravan of slaves being taken to the markets in the south. She's in a tight spot.

Then the really scary thing happens: her purchasers take her, along with other newly purchased slaves, to an unofficial crosstime portal…leaving open the question of whether Crosstime Traffic will ever be able to recover her!

SPOILERS

I’m not sure what Harry Turtledove is doing with In High Places, from the “Young Adult” Crosstime Traffic series. This time the teenage heroine, Annette, is in a quasi-Medieval alternate timeline where the Black Death so devastated Europe that the Muslim world was able to reconquer Spain and push into southern France. She and her parents, posing as Muslim olive oil merchants, are on their way “home” to Marseilles to go back to their timeline when their caravan is attacked by bandits and Annette is captured and sold into slavery. It turns out the slavers are renegade Crosstime Traffic officials, who don’t realize Annette is “one of them”. (This also answered a question I had from some of the earlier novels – whether Crosstime Traffic was a government agency or a private corporation – it’s the later, and thus a subtheme (well, more like an infratheme) in In High Places is Dangers of Big Corporations.)


The lot of female slaves is a pretty delicate subject for a “young adult” novel and Turtledove treats it with euphemisms. However, he also does something a little astonishing; one of the female slaves is also from Annette’s timeline – but she’s a volunteer “on vacation”; someone who wants to be mistreated. All I can think of is Turtledove is trying to take the theme of Fifty Shades of Grey and break it to teenagers gently. It all feels a little off. The whole Crosstime Traffic series is like this; Turtledove has plenty of chances to be didactic on important issues – how medieval life was far from romantic (Gunpowder Empire and In High Places), why socialism is a bad idea (The Gladiator), and how maybe pacifism might have drawbacks (Curious Notions) - but he always seems to draw back just before delivering the knockout punch. Perhaps he’s just preaching to the subset of readers who will pick up on the subtlety.


I’m a little mystified by Turtledove’s popularity; and that includes his popularity with me; I’ve never read a Turtledove novel I didn’t enjoy at least three stars worth. I’d never claim he’s a great writer, but he’s comfortable one; the literary equivalent of Mom’s meatloaf. ( )

I am a fan of Turtledove's work, in general, but this was disappointing. 1/3 of the book takes place in an Alternate Earth where the Black Plague wiped out 90% of Europe and stunted technology development to the point where the world is still in the Middle Ages in 2096. The middle 1/3 takes place in some other alternate Earth, apparently one where the Roman Empire never developed and is even more primitive, and the rest in the future of 2096 - except the future feels more like 1996. The alternate Earth concept is interesting but he should have used it to come up with a better plot. I have the feeling this was intended as a YA book and that limited the scope and complexity of the plot, which resulted in a very simple novel without any of Turtledove's characteristic interesting characters. While in general I usually can see where Turtledove comes up with his alternate history concepts, in this one, they are just too biased to be enjoyable. Just because Europe was devastated, does that really lead to a world in 2096 that has the technology of 1496? Also, because of this skewing of time, we can't run into any interesting characters from 'our' timeline - there isn't any, and he didn't make up any either. Not bad, just very blah. ( )

A world in which Islam is more powerful than our own.