Will You Stop Touching Things!

Fifteen Postcards by Kirsten McKenzie (2019) – Sarah Lester inherited an antique shop following the mysterious disappearance of both her parents. As she struggles to keep the shop open, and find any clues to the disappearances, she comes across a collection of estate antiques, including fifteen postcards. What she doesn’t expect is to be hurled from her comfortable life in the shop across both time and space! Is it connected to the mystery surrounding her parents? Is there another mystery here to be solved?

Why I Liked It – Well written blend of time travel, mystery, and history.

I don’t know how I keep doing this. This is book one in a trilogy. A trilogy whose existence I completely missed. This is not the author’s fault, it’s mine, but it puts me in a grumpy mood at the start. Kirsten McKenzie did what was needed to largely lift my reading grump.

This is a cool story that uses magical portals through time and space to move Sarah from modern England to earlier times, and as far away as the British Raj in India. McKenzie does a nice job of putting you into the place and time. The characters are solid, if slightly cliche. (Upper class family, two brothers, one is noble, the other…not). The author has real life experience in small antique stores, and it adds some nice depth to the routine scenes in the shop. It all carried me along quite nicely.

I have some issues, however:

• Sarah has no compunction about stealing in the past. She sees something that will be a cool antique in a hundred years and works hard at taking it with her. It’s still stealing. She tries to deny it, but it is what it is.
• Sarah adapts to the new time and place awfully quickly. And with no apparent concern about how she’s getting back. It’s all a process she doesn’t understand, but acts as if it will all take care of itself.
• Finally, but most annoying, is Sarah touches an item and is transported to a different point on the timeline. In a process that is quite painful. When she returns, she touches a different item and is transported again. Fine, I can buy that. Then there’s a third time, and a fourth. She’s never TRYING to do this, she just continues to keep handling the items from the estate. I’m sorry, that’s just not very bright. I’d put them all in a safe corner and touch them only with gloves or, better yet, the proverbial ten-foot tongs.

My quibbles aren’t enough to keep me from wanting to see where this all goes. I just purchased the other two books. I’ll add to my thoughts when I’ve read them.

Rating – *** Worth A Look