Magic in the Mix by Annie Barrow - OPTIONAL

Barrows, Annie Magic in the Mix, 224 p. Bloomsbury, 2014.  $17.  Violence: PG (not graphic); Language: G; Mature Content: G.  

Molly and Miri have returned from the past and now the world and their family think that they are one of three sets of twins in the family  - not that the girls rescued Molly from an abusive situation in history.  The girls’ dad is tearing up the front porch and time has cracked open again.  Miri is worried that Molly might sacrifice themselves in order to save her mother.  But they have bigger problems when their older brothers are mistakenly drawn back to the Civil War and are captured by a cruel man in the South while they are dressed in Northern uniforms.  The girls will have to move quickly and brilliantly in order to save the boys.

  

I wanted to love this so much.  Even though I don’t know anything about the first book in the series, The Magic Half, I like the premise very much.  And Barrows has written not only the Ivy + Bean series, but also The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, which is brilliant historical fiction.  This one is kind of all over the place, though.  It has so much setup before the Civil War scenes, that it feels like the first in a series, not the second, which should have dropped us right into the action.  That’s a lot of pages for an elementary series that doesn’t really deliver.  

EL - OPTIONAL.  Cindy, Library Teacher