Chasing Time is a treat for both children and adults - anyone who enjoys
using imagination and loves magic, mystery, aliens, and fantasy. Danny Chase
and Murg, the talking cat, return in a new adventure, the sequel to The Magic Bicycle. Danny and Murg have trouble with Spike, the leader of a gang called the Headbangers, who is a bully and makes life miserable for Danny.
Chasing Time will keep young adults on the edge of their seats.
—Top of Texas Reviews
Gr 5-7Danny Chase, owner of a bicycle that makes the Magic School Bus look like a Model T, pursues bully Spike Blocker through space and time in this bloated sequel to The Magic Bicycle (Otter Creek, 1998). The bike, given to Danny in the first book by a grateful alien, will go anywhere and become anything he can imagineso he is understandably dismayed when Spike steals a piece of it, creates a bike of his own, and sets off for the past, intending to amass a collection of significant home-run baseballs that he can auction off for the stake that will allow him to leave his brutally abusive stepfather, Ike. Creating a supporting cast that includes telepathic cats, Men (and a Woman) in Black, evil sorceress Morgan Le Fay, and several historical figures, Hill sends his teenaged protagonists barreling through past and future on a chase so protracted that even Danny (never mind readers) starts feeling a sense of dj vu. In the end, after heart-to-hearts with Plato, Shakespeare, Jeannette dArc, and Babe Ruth, plus a violent climax that Danny witnesses and then averts by changing the course of history, Spike and Danny bury the hatchet, Spike and Ike agree to seek counseling, and other conflicts are resolved with similar tidiness. Stuffed with subplots, repetitive scenes, a plethora of pithy quotations and old saws, plus revisited characters and incidents from the previous book, this genre buster is more a bulging grab bag of disparate elements than an organized story.John Peters, New York Public Library Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
