Fascinating little adventure about a young boy who discovers a portal to the past in his Grandma's basement. ( )

I wanted to like this one a lot more than I actually did, but from the start, it was a little confused in style and glazed over some aspects and going into detail on other areas, leaving me wishing that something more had been said about something else instead.

It's singularly lacking in description - the "freaks" are mostly left up to the imagination of the reader, but with precious little to begin formulating the picture to begin with. The characters are mostly very two-dimensional and I never really cared much about what happened to any of them.

The ending is left with threads dangling all over the place, leaving me wishing I had either a big needle to sew it all up neatly, or a massive pair of scissors to shear them all off cleanly!

This story had great potential, but most of the possibilities were left unexplored and ultimately, I was left feeling unfulfilled. ( )

Tom is dealing with his mother's cancer. His father is in Australia and his mother decides that it's time to visit her mother and make amends.

There's something odd in the basement though, voices and smells filter through from the early 18th century, and through a gap in the room, Tom finds himself in 18th Century London, among the Freaks from a freakshow.

Their Giant is dead and they want to save him from the Anatomists. Passing from his own time to the earlier time - where he's invisible but his clothes aren't! Being in the past hurts too but Tom wants to help.

An interesting story about coming to terms with things and trying to learn to live with both the things you can change and the things you can't and the courage to do what you can to change both yourself and to help others. ( )