Lizard Larson and the Time Keeper
by Gary Natoli
Style: Younger Grownup / Sci-Fi & Fantasy
ISBN: 9798350944761
Print Size: 382 pages
Reviewed by Andrea Marks-Joseph
The thrilling story of a time-jumping teenager racing to rescue her dad and mom
Lizard Larson and the Time Keeper is an action-packed thriller following a young person who’s taken out of college by her dad and mom one afternoon and, just some hours later, finds herself misplaced in an underworld of adults from the longer term. Fourteen-year-old Lizard (authorities title Elizabeth, however she finds the widespread nickname Liz “too unimpressive, too plain.”) learns she will be able to cease time—on the actual second her dad and mom mysteriously disappear and secret brokers from the longer term start to hunt her down.
Lizard Larson and the Time Keeper is a worrying learn in essentially the most scrumptious, enthralling method; you’re at all times on the sting of your seat. The sticky scenario that Lizard is in retains getting extra tangled, and we will’t make sure if anybody is telling her the reality. Who can she belief? Who’s mendacity to her face? The place are her dad and mom? Is she gonna be okay?
And we develop to care a lot! We really feel for Lizard as a result of she actually comes throughout as a typical teen. At solely fourteen, she’s in a clumsy “I’m not like different women” section, nonetheless figuring herself out, whereas she craves the consolation of lengthy faculty days spent messing up experiments at school together with her greatest good friend. Creator Gary Natoli has written one thing tender and fragile and true within the in-between moments of Lizard navigating this science-fiction mess. We see her as she is, a fourteen-year-old pressured to shake off the all-black-everything armor of her teendom and left alone within the broad world not figuring out who to belief.
As a reader, I felt protecting over her. I felt like I used to be thrown into this determined and dramatic whirlwind alongside Lizard. She actually awakened someday, went to high school, and then simply by no means went residence. Alongside the best way, on this thriller that retains revealing extra of itself, Lizard misplaced her dad and mom in an explosion, found that she will be able to cease time, discovered that her physicist dad and mom’ work created a machine to time-travel. She is even kidnapped and experimented on by part-cyborg individuals and befriends somebody who later loses their limb for a second time. When she escapes with the assistance of a insurgent soldier, she learns extra in regards to the terrifying group looking her down: “Hurt me? You’ve obtained to be kidding. I believe they wish to kill me.” “They need you for a lot worse.” She’s fourteen! It’s quite a bit for one lady to cope with!
One way or the other, regardless of the stress and fear on behalf of Lizard, this guide is nice to learn. It’s far more thrilling than it’s scary or upsetting, and as extra data is revealed to Lizard, suspicions are both dismissed or validated. Each time somebody I doubted earlier within the guide lies to her, it cleverly involves gentle as a trick or a clue alongside the journey.
Readers who love mysteries may have a area day with this one. A lot is going on, and Lizard solely is aware of (or maybe, in her extremely worrying scenario, solely has capability to consider the very most pressing matter) to second-guess about half of them. The reader both picks up on way more than she does, or we’re dragged across the nook holding our breath alongside her whereas the enemy secret brokers go away the constructing. I couldn’t consider a extra excellent encapsulation of the phrase thrilling than this story.
Natoli writes the time-stopping with an attractive sense of fascination as Lizard is navigating what it’s, and what it means: “All the pieces in sight—vehicles, buses, pedestrians, canine on leashes, a airplane a long way on the horizon, and a cascade of raindrops—have been all suspended. There should be some boundary to this frozen bubble of time, however at the moment, it was visibly limitless.”
A lot unravels for Lizard on this guide, and so many new truths reply questions she by no means knew to ask. However we nonetheless have a lot to find! The character of the Time Keeper and your entire idea of The Company of Time is fascinating, however we’ve simply had a style of what all of it means. There’s way more of its advanced, intriguing, one-of-a-kind clockwork physique to disclose in a follow-up guide. “Someplace in that thriller,” Lizard tells the reader, “is perhaps the answer to unraveling this paradox she was wrapped in.” That alone is greater than sufficient to drag me in for extra of this story. The ultimate line of this guide—not a spoiler, simply a superb intro to the thought of a sequel—encapsulates all that I’m anticipating from studying extra of Lizard’s adventures: “As soon as by means of the door, her life would tackle unimaginable potentialities, and maybe a brand new time would start.”
Content material warnings are essential for the grief and confusion of out of the blue dropping your dad and mom.Additionally, in a analysis lab, Lizard is drugged by the meals she’s given and suffers by means of tortuous medical experimentation, together with electrocution.
Lizard Larson and the Time Keeper jogged my memory of the Useless Boy Detectives sequence, with its quirky intricate magic and charming-but-prickly youngsters who bounce off the web page and into my coronary heart virtually instantly. It’s an ideal match for followers of Nathan Burgoine’s younger grownup teleportation novel Exit Plans for Teenage Freaks. The instances when the bureau is surveilling and experimenting on Lizard to extract and replicate no matter a part of her can cease time jogged my memory of the Prime Video sequence Gen V. Lizard Larson and the Time Keeper matches its “don’t belief the adults, we now have to do that ourselves” power.
This guide can be nice for followers of mysteries, time-travel, and teenage protagonists who’ve to determine the way to save the world and handle being a young person with a complicated crush on the similar time. Lizard Larson and the Time Keeper is action-packed and unforgettable. I’d extremely advocate it.
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