Thursday Review: When You Were Young (Children of Eternity 4) by Claire Lachance

If you remember last week I reviewed Book 3 of the Children of Eternity series and promised this week I would review the conclusion When You Were Young.  So that would be today!

For three years amnesiac Samantha Young has been shuttling between her home on the island of Eternity, where she's the head of 50 other displaced children, and a coastal Maine town where her boyfriend Joseph lives.  Now 17, Samantha faces a big choice about whether to stay on the island to look after the kids or to go off with Joseph to California, where he's going to college.  She's so worked up about this she goes off to a bar and gets roaring drunk.

When she wakes up, she's back on the island--in a crib!  Only then does Samantha find out the little girl named Becky she's been caring for the last 3 years is actually an old nemesis named Veronica who has a score to settle with Samantha.  Though in true comic book villain style Veronica doesn't just kill her adversary.  Instead she uses the water to make Samantha and her friends into toddlers she can torment.

Samantha and her friends manage to escape and end up at the Fountain of Youth only to find it's coated with some kind of weird red algae stuff.  When she falls into the fountain, Samantha wakes up and finds herself back in the past, just before she lost her memory.  Saying anything more about that would spoil too much of the story.

Samantha's friends Prudence and Wendell are also transported to the past, only way back to 1649-ish when they first came to Eternity with Reverend Crane.  Again I can't say too much of what's going on.

Meanwhile on the island in the present, Veronica takes Joseph hostage and tries to force him to find a way to get rid of the weird algae so she'll have access to the fountain water again.  If you want a hint at the ending, it's kind of like "Return of the Jedi" with Molly Brigham as Darth Vader.

Probably the best thing is that if you've read all the others you finally get all your questions answered.  We finally learn who Samantha was before she ended up on the island and how she lost her memory.  Plus we get to see how exactly Reverend Crane took over the island and enslaved everyone. 

The drawback is that while the first two were really for kids and the third more for teens, this one gets into more adult situations.  In large part it's because the kids are adults through much of the book.  But that does mean you probably don't want your kids to read it right away.  I'm just saying.

Tomorrow I put a bow on the year with the PT Dilloway Blog Annual #1...