Great book! It was recommended as a book similar to the Twilight series. I enjoyed the characters and the plot. ( )

Girl is not satisfied with almost perfect boyfriend. He is too predictable". Enter the bad boy, who isn't actually bad, and can't do anything physically to the girl because of some ridiculously made up "rules".

Throw in a generous dash of the badboy telling the girl how "special" and "perfect" she is and you get this confectionary of girly fantasy." ( )

I'm not sure how much longer I'm going to be posting stuff here, what with the sale to Amazon, but until I decide where I'm going I might as well continue.

Abigail "Abby" Beatrice Edmunds is a few days short of her seventeenth birthday when a new student arrives at her school, an Italian called Dante Alexander about whom no one knows much except that he's a protege of Leo, who owns and runs the cool (but alcohol-free) hangout The Dungeon. Although Abby has for ages been going steady with boy-next-door boyfriend Jason -- they even have the same birthday, how cute is that? -- she finds herself instantly drawn to the tall, graceful, artistically talented, doe-eyed, poetry-spouting Dante because, well, gosh! He doesn't sparkle but he does just about everything else a girl could want.

Abby's world goes even topsier-turvier in that he seems to think she's pretty special too, and they're thrown together a bit because she's assistant-directing the upcoming school production of Much Ado About Nothing and he's got a part as an extra and occasional set-builder.

Also hanging around the school is this really ace band called Zero Hour who're all the rage. Abby's bestest friend Valerie falls in love with the drummer, V, and then with the angelic lead singer, Zo -- strangely overlooking the other guy, Tony -- and deserts Abby for the joys of (presumably chaste) groupiehood. By then Abby has worked out that the band-members are totally you-know-whats and that there's something going on between them and Dante. After Zero Hour do a gig at the Valentine's Day hop at school, everyone starts breaking up with their steadies, one such bustup being that Jason dumps Abby which, although her ego gets a little dented, she doesn't much mind because she's going all, like, spoony about Dante by now. Who turns out to be a time traveler who was involved in revolutionary politics in early-16th-century Florence and as a punishment got sent hundreds of years into the future bu use of a time machine that he'd helped Leonardo da Vinci design!!!.

Just when you're looking at Abby's middle name, Beatrice, and coming to an obvious conclusion, you realize that Dante Alexander was born a couple of centuries too late to be the Dante (although this is the first volume in a trilogy so who knows where in time he's going to land by Vol. 3?). And Leo isn't Leonardo da Vinci, either; the feisty inventor is still stuck back in Florence getting pissed off because his time machine has been confiscated and his apprentice has disappeared. The members of Zero Hour were fellow-revolutionaries who got the same punishment as Dante and hate his guts because they think he narked on them, which he kinda did.

The gushy prose and Abby's determinedly adolescent mentality had me in despair by page 70 or so, but then things picked up a bit. There's a nicely handled sequence (explained much later) whereby a bit of close contact with Dante results in Abby suffering odd little time dislocations. From then on I wouldn't say I was gripped, but I was getting enough from the tale to keep going. The characters hardly leap off the page, especially the bad boys of Zero Hour, who're just sort of bad, without much further personality than that; similarly, Valerie comes across as just an airhead BF supplied by Central Casting.

A more serious flaw concerns the mixing of metaphor with what's presented as (fantasticated) reality. We're told that the normal flow of time is sort of like a flowing river, which is fair enough (not if you're into physics, of course, but this is just a story); Dante, despite dwelling in the present, can't really be a part of it -- which has a bonus, that he'll be immortal. The downside is that, to retain his temporal balance, he has to resort every now and then to what we could think of as the bank of that river. Again, there's nothing wrong with the imagery. But then Abby herself goes to the "bank" and, guess what?, it turns out -- though all desolate and such -- to be basically like a riverbank, and you can look at a literal river of time flowing all luminously through the middle of this spectral otherworld. To escape back into the past you'd need a bridge to get to the time machine (the hourglass door of the title), which you can see sitting there on the far bank. And, sure enough, Abby's presence (or something) manages briefly to reify a bridge. The three bad guys use the puppyish Valerie to force Abby to bring the bridge back into existence long enough that they can scamper across it, go back to their own era, where, being still immortal, they'll come to rule the world.

By the time I'd waded through all this I was feeling a bit bait-and-switched: I'd accepted an okay (if hardly original) piece of metaphor and had then been informed it wasn't metaphor at all but I was still stuck with it.

This is better written than the few pages I was able to stomach of a book that's obviously comparable in terms of setting and plot elements, Twilight. That's hardly the highest of praise, of course, so I should qualify the remark by saying that Abby's narration, however annoying I might find it, seems authentic and is certainly consistent; in short, while this ain't memorable prose, the writing isn't actually bad . . . in the same way that there's nothing actually wrong with elevator music except, you know. Mangum clearly has a good imagination; I hope she'll eventually channel it into something I could enjoy more.
( )

I was up until 1:00 AM finishing the first book in this trilogy, and I can’t wait to start on the second. At first I was reminded of Twilight because of intensity in the relationship between the two main characters, Abby and Dante. But rather than vampires and werewolves, this series involves time travel via a device designed by Da Vinci and created by Dante, his apprentice. This YA series has received excellent reviews, and is catching on quickly now that the final book in the trilogy was recently released. I had to hurry up and read it because there was a hold on the book. The same is true of the second. For an engrossing read, I highly recommend this trilogy. ( )

Abby (never Abigail) lives a normal and well . . . boring life. She is ready for her next step in life to be anything, but what’s expected. Little does she realize that the moment Dante enters her life things will never be normal again. Time may very well stop.

I picked this book up last year while in Indianapolis, near midnight in a Barnes and Noble. Tired and ready for a good book to jump off the shelf, this book, The Hourglass Door, caught my eye. Ever the book cover judge, I was ultimately intrigued by its award status, ForeWord Reviews’ Book of the Year Award Winner. I’m never one to pay close attention to awards, in a sense it doesn’t make or break whether I read it. However, this impressed me as The Hourglass Door is Lisa Mangum’s first book.

At times the book is very evidently a first book; what with character’s banter back and forth and predictability. I am, though, somewhat of a dialogue junky and can be quite picky. Lisa Mangum has a great gift for writing poetic like analogies. She won me over with her descriptions of feelings and settings. I would have liked a better balance between the maturity of the mental musings of Abby and the overall story. She seemed misplaced for the world around her. I don’t believe that was intentional, but I could be wrong.

It is very refreshing to read a YA novel that is not drowning in sexual overdrive. There is romance, but it fits with the story, as well as the characters themselves. To make a sort of intentional nonsense comment “It is nice to read a ‘nice’ book.”

I will be reading her other books. I look forward to following her career in the writing world. ( )