Playing with Time in The Glass Sentence

S o many writers aspire to be the next J. R. R. Tolkien. Their fantastical stories sprawl across numerous volumes and try to cram in as many strange creatures and made-up names as possible. Unfortunately, these attempts often come across as cluttered, affected, or just plain odd. World-building is a skill, and if you’ve honed it, your work will have more success in capturing the imagination of readers.

S. E. Grove in The Glass Sentence has almost found the right balance in this area by mixing genres and giving readers a thrilling counterfactual twist in her world-building. The world seems familiar, at first. It’s Boston in 1891—how strange could that be? Slowly, however, we realize that this Boston — with its 20-hour clocks, “Goodyears,” and a parliament — is not what we thought. Furthermore, while Boston is in the geographical locale one would expect, the territory surrounding it isn’t the U.S.: It’s New Occident.

One-hundred years before the book’s story occurs, there was an earth-altering event: the Great Disruption. On July 16, 1799, time splintered. Suddenly, the earth was full of innumerable Ages: “It became apparent that in one terrible moment, the various parts of the world had come apart. They were unfastened from time. Spinning freely in different directions, each piece of the world had been flung into a different Age. When the moment passed, the pieces lay scattered as close to each other in space as they had always been, but hopelessly separated by time.”

Playing with time is a daring plot choice, but Grove is clever. Never over-explaining, she carefully weaves her pieces together and uses chapter headings to explain “historical” information and define terms. In fact, it is her lack of explanation on some points that drives the narrative forward. Just as there are mysteries in our own world, so too do some elements of hers remain perplexing and tantalizing.

One apparently familiar concept is that of maps. Now that the world has changed so dramatically, a good map is of utmost importance. Sophia Tims is well aware of this, living as she does with her renowned cartologer uncle, Shadrack. The two have lived together ever since Sophia’s explorer parents went off to rescue a friend and never returned. That was eight years ago. The now-13-year-old Sophia is a clever, self-reliant girl, but in a world where an understanding of time is your lifeline to reality, she is in a sense “timeless.” Unlike everyone else around her, she has no internal clock, and one moment to her could be five hours in real time. Even her days blur together, leaving her unable to remember events distinctly. Our heroine struggles mightily against this seeming flaw, working hard to compensate by using the “lifewatch” assigned to her at birth (a requirement for citizens of New Occident), and by journaling out her daily doings in picture form. This sense of time and timelessness is on continual display throughout the tale, as we learn about new Ages, surprising creatures, and strange natural elements. Far from being disconcerting to read, however, the narrative is clear, and the author applies her made-up concepts in creative ways.

With so many Ages, adventures are bound to present themselves, and one quite literally crashes through Sophia and Shadrack’s door. When her uncle is kidnapped, Sophia is thrown into a race against time, as she hunts for both Shadrack and the key to the perplexing artifact he left her.

The illustrator of this book certainly rose to the challenge, creating detailed maps of the world to help wondering readers. In our own world, our maps are often digital and give a narrow perspective. This story awakens the mind and eye to the beauty of a well-drawn map, and then takes it a step further by claiming that maps can be made on many surfaces, including stone, clay, cloth, and even water.

The Glass Sentence uses the maps described in its pages to walk the fine line between fantasy and reality. When it comes to the creation and reading of various maps, magic isn’t mentioned, spells aren’t used, and puzzles are solved in a logical manner. An unexplainable element remains, though, making readers stop to ponder.

The characters who fill this book are vividly described and can be quite outlandish. A boy from the Badlands, covered in feathers; a pirate brother and sister; a veiled woman; henchmen with matching, gruesome facial scars. While they are physically intriguing, the depths of their personalities sometimes get lost as the story progresses. As Grove tries to balance complex storylines all joining together, along with all these characters, the final third of the book feels a bit rushed and incomplete. Minor characters come and go without explanation, a few plot points aren’t tied up, and some scenes feel implausible — even for a fantasy tale.

The book also stumbles a little when it comes to dialogue: Occasionally, characters sound trite, silly, or stilted. One other disappointment is the author’s unwillingness to take a moral stance on one of her themes, namely, lying. Touched on a few times, this subject comes up between Sophia and her friend, Theo. Theo sees nothing wrong with lying, as it gives him a protective shield, keeping him from being “pinned down.” Sophia disagrees with him, but soon uses his methods when trying to save her uncle. Instead of making a distinction between these types of lies, though, the author has Sophia gloat to Theo about her successful dishonestly. This is unfortunate and diminishes some of the respect we’ve gained for Sophia over the story’s course.

The Glass Sentence is part one of a three-part series and makes for light, cozy fall reading. Grove teases book two’s contents at the end of book one, and when I dig myself out from my pile of grading, I’ll have it waiting for me. Clever world-building, unusual characters, and thrilling adventure have me excited to see where Sophia and her friends travel next in the Mapmakers Trilogy.