Charlie Bone and the Time Twister: Lots of flaws

Charlie Bone and the Time Twister by Jenny Nimmo

The first Charlie Bone book had lots of basic flaws in it: lack of story or character development, a sense of arbitrariness, an overly familiar feel to it, etc., but the premise was just interesting enough, and the characters’ magical “endowments” just quirky enough that one hoped Jenny Nimmo could improve in book two and start putting together a worthwhile series. Sadly, based on this second effort, that hope isn’t borne out.

First, Charlie Bone and the Time Twister simply has a careless feel to it. There are far too many places where the author either contradicts herself or tosses in an out-of-the-blue plot moment or arbitrarily assigns an endowment or task to a character. It’s almost as if Nimmo herself doesn’t care much about the story or its characters. As two quick examples: in one section Charlie and his friend Fidelio are aware of Billy Raven’s “intense stare” while they are plotting something (this after both have spoken of Billy’s penchant for spying). Only a paragraph later, Fidelio tells Charlie if they can divert the attention of just Manfred and Asa (two bad students) they’d be fine as nobody else would bother to watch them. Except, perhaps, the kid they’ve already told us is a spy and who is staring at them right now? In another scene, Charlie is speaking to Cook and trying to keep a secret from two bystanders — “What about you-know-who?” he asks. But literally only a half-dozen lines later he asks her “but what are we going to do about Henry?” So much for not prying any information out of Charlie. There are other examples of this sort of carelessness — even if the author can’t be bothered to catch them one would think/hope her editor would.

But there are other problems as well. The characters, including Charlie, are all far too shallow. There is little to no development of any of the major characters. Plot events tumble one over the other with little sense of structure or purpose, and characters perform actions that are seemingly utterly arbitrary, with little sense of motivation save the author’s need to move the plot in some direction or other. And plot threads from book one are barely touched upon at all here, adding to the sense of arbitrariness. The settings suffer from a lack of development so that one seldom has any true sense of a real world being created. The book has a sketchy feel all the way through it, as if one pitched a neat idea (the X-men kids meet Harry Potter and Hogwarts) but never filled in the blanks.

In short, there is none of the richness of character, plot, or setting that one sees in other recent works of young adult fantasy, whether it be the Harry Potter books, or Gregor the Overlander or The Water Mirror or more classic works such as the rediscovered Narnia series or Earthsea. There’s too much good stuff out there to keep hoping this series will get better so a recommendation to skip Charlie Bone and try something else.