The Pocket and the Pendant [Paperback]

The invented mythology that fuels the plot of this book, a blend of Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman and many others that I'm sure I missed, was absolute genius. Upon reaching the portion of the book where the backstory was told (think of Frodo arriving at Rivendell and everyone sharing their stories, particularly Gandalf), I became hooked. Many of the questions I had amassed during the pages prior to this were answered, as well as ones I didn't know that I had. It's a testimony to the author's inventiveness that he held my attention from the moment the mythos was being explained until it was over. What makes it more impressive is that this took roughly forty-five pages.

The problem is that I almost didn't get there. The first chapter was a great hook, with time stopping and all, but I grew wary when inconsistencies started popping up, and I felt that certain portions of the text should have come before others and so on...and then UFOs entered the picture. I had some difficulty with Sumerian artifacts, magic books, and UFOs being in the same picture, but, like I said, all of that was answered during the explanation referenced above. Also, italics are used far too often. One uses italics to emphasize, but when they're overused, they lose their emphasis and begin to blend in with everything else on the page. The tyranny of italics...

I believe that there is a great story here, that the author has a tremendous, inventive imagination (frankly, the concepts often left me speechless), and that what separates this book from "good" and "excellent" (i.e., 3 or 5 stars) is a competent editor. Books that include time travel are very difficult to plan, organize, plot, and ultimately write.

One other thing: I thought the book ended stronger than it began (with the exception of the first chapter).

And in a second book, which is not so casually hinted at, I'd like to see the characters resolving their conflicts instead of relying on a god-like character which is, essentially, an adult. There's nothing wrong with strong adult presences in young adult literature, but the young adults in the book should be a bit more involved, in my opinion.

Still, I want to emphasize that this is *not* a negative review. Three stars, in my rating system, is "good"; therefore, this is a positive review. There's good material here, I just think with some tightening it could be even better. And personally, I'm looking forward to the follow-up to this book.

I do not think you can really say that someone is being too imaginative, because these is nothing about an overwhelming collection of creative concepts that could not be cured by a solid academic essay or an annotated edition. But then few people have jammed as much imagination in a 212-page book as Mark Jeffrey has in "The Pocket and the Pendant." For this one you need to be up on your knowledge of the mythology of the ancient Sumerians, both the basic and complex rules of traveling through time and realities, a few of the fundamental laws of science, and how to read between the lines.

If you note that the book does not have a dedication, but rather a statement of ownership, then you are aware that you have entered into a special place before you get to the first page of the story itself. The first chapter introduces so to "A Very Strange Little Boy" by the name of Max Quick. But our attention is diverted from Max before we even meet him because the first line of the novel tells us that "On April 8th at exactly 3:38 in the afternoon the world STOPPED." Virtually everybody and everything on the planet is now frozen in silence. But, of course, there are some exceptions to the rule, one of whom is Max Quick, the aforementioned strange little boy.

The first part of "The Pocket and the Pendant" is rather reminiscent of an episode of "The Twilight Zone" (a couple of them actually, if you count all of the versions of the series), where the world is frozen but you can run around and do anything you want, crossed with "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," the archetype of stories where kids get to do anything they want. Well, not everything, because there are some limitations, as well as some pressing practical concerns, given the situation. Max explores this new state of the world and finds that he is not the only one who is still capable of moving about. But the simple idea that this stoppage in time, the "pocket" of the title, is related to the solar eclipse quickly gives way to a more interesting explanation that puts Max Quick and his friends at the center of a mystery involving the "pendant."

"The Pocket and the Pendant" is a story where telling you the hook is necessary and sufficient information for you to determine if you are interested in reading the book, so there is no need to expand further. Max is twelve years old, but Jeffrey's book reads quite a bit older than the pre-teen age group. Of course, comparisons of Max Quick to Harry Potter are inevitable, but they are valid only in the limited sense that "Charmed" and "Stargate SG-1" are comparable. There is much more imagination involved here and it is the unusualness of the situation and the speed with which things more (think Saturday morning serials) more than anything else that hampers the development of the characters. Also, do not be surprised if you go running to the Internet between chapters to find out more about Gilgamesh and other interesting tidbits that Jeffrey drops into the mix (not that I did that, because I have taught "The Epic of Gilgamesh," but even if you have heard of the first epic hero of Western Civilization does not mean you remember anything specific about him, unless, of course, you caught the "Darmok" episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation")

That last digression and its various relations in this review should give you an indication of the creative scope of this novel. My only complaint, idiosyncratic and minor as it might be, is that I wish "The Pocket and the Pendant" had been printed as a paperback. Given the size of the type font relative to the size of the pages we end up with a whole lot more one-line paragraphs than we would otherwise. It gives reading this book a different feel than I think it should have. If the next book is printed in this same size I would really like to see a bigger font used.

I read the first two chapters of this book on the author's website, really enjoyed them and decided to purchase it. I love books about time travel and reading yourself into books and stuff like that so I figured this would be right up my alley. I was initially wary because it was self published, I learned the hard way from Shadowmancer that an editor really does make a difference and that is very true in this case. This book is definitely flawed: characters are not very developed and a little unrealistic, sometimes the writing is rather distracting from the story, and someone needs to take the author's italics key away from him by force because its out of control, but it is a testament to the story that Jeffrey wants to tell that, despite all of that, I still read the entire book, enjoyed it and would actually recommend it to others. I think if I were a young adult, presumably the target audience, I would be rather offended at being called at little kid at 13 (especially if I am a reader who is younger than that), but there is something appealing about the story and it is the strength of the story that makes this book worth reading even though the telling is not all that great. It has a lot of interesting parts and it reads like the first draft of something which, with a little skilled editing, could be cleaned up into a real classic!