My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time

Charlotte Shleswig is a precocious young prostitute living in the Osterbro neighborhood of Copenhagen in 1890. She has been raised in a orphanage and has given herself an idiosyncratic eduction by reading every mouldering book she finds in the orphanage basement. Her reading has provided a useful fund of knowledge to accompany her considerable street smarts. It has also lent her a literary style that can be arch or wickedly funny. She tells her adventures with a voice that evokes Nicholas Nickleby coauthored by Moll Flanders with the occasional foray into Fanny Hill.

And she does have adventures. She solves the mystery buried in the basement of her employer, the hideous Fru Krak. She travels through time, winding up in 21st century London. She finds true love with a Scottish archeologist. She works out a scheme to protect the time traveling device by watching a single episode of Scooby Doo her fist day in a London high-rise apartment.

She is great fun, but I have to admit she began to wear on me about halfway through the novel. The prose can be laugh-out-loud funny, but relentless cleverness can only hold my attention so far. There is a large and lively cast of characters but I cared about them about as much as I cared about the characters on Lost, meaning that however entertaining I found them I was not at all concerned about what fate might befall them. A grisly death would be just as satisfying as seeing things work out well. And it is clear from pretty early on in Jensen's novel that what we have here is a fairy tale of the happy-ever-after variety.

I found this book listed in Damien Broderick's and Paul di Filippo's 101 Best Science Fiction Novels, 1985 - 2010. SF fans are not likely to take much a shine to it. I suppose the time travel aspect makes if science fiction, but it is pure fantasy. The workings of Prof. Krak's time machine have more in common with Peter Pan's flying instructions to Wendy than to any even half-hearted effort at considering the science involved.