Fog Magic

This is a cute old-fashioned timeslip story. If you like that sort of thing (think Tom's Midnight Garden, Charlotte Sometimes, or A Traveller In Time) then you'll probably like this as well! If that doesn't sound like your sort of thing, then maybe you'll find it a little slow. Just a warning: this is called Fog Magic, but the fantasy is pretty low-key here. The magic simply involves going back (100 years?) in time. I'm sure that for modern readers, life in a 1940s or 19th century Nova Scotia fishing village seems equally foreign. I enjoyed it, but if you're looking for more fantasy than historical fiction, you may not appreciate this. I don't know where I got it, but this book has been sitting on my bookshelf for years. I never had much of an interest in reading it until I became interested in children's timeslip stories. Most of these are impossible to get on Kindle, so I've been ordering used copies on Amazon. Since I owned this one already, I decided to give it a try. I'm glad I did. One of the more interesting things about this book is its setting - a fishing village in Nova Scotia. It really reminded me of some of L.M. Montgomery's stories. Most of her stories are set in the farmlands of Prince Edward Island, but some are set in fishing villages. Obviously this book was written after Montgomery had written many of her stories and in a slightly different location, but I can absolutely see the similarities. The difference here is that Montgomery's view of fishing villages often was that they were filled with harshness, poverty,and vices - she was a middle/upper class minister's wife after all. Julia L. Sauer, on the other hand, is obviously charmed by them. It was refreshing to get this point of view. The ending of Fog Magic was slightly disappointing and abrupt. There were so many questions left unanswered. We never learn how the magic works - why can Addingtons visit the past? How many have done so? Do they all go to the same time period, or do they travel a set amount of time into the past? What is the mystery of Anthony? Does a ghost really haunt the woods? It had even less explanations than your average old-fashioned children's fantasy. Despite all that, I actually appreciated it. Sometimes explanations of magic can be disappointing and slightly stupid (I wasn't particularly impressed by the explanation in Tom's Midnight Garden, for example). The vagueness just adds to the mystery of the story. As Mrs. Morrill says in the book, "Of course there's an answer [...] But that doesn't mean we need to know the answer." Review originally from my Goodreads page