The Tattered Box

by Paul Schumacher

Overview

Eighteen-year-old John receives a peculiar gift from his elderly grandpa: a timeworn box filled with items from the past. John soon discovers what they all mean when he travels back to 1941 and suddenly finds himself the same age as his grandpa. They play baseball together, enjoy a double date, yet endure hardships and the imminent threat of war. As the items in the box become the ultimate storytellers, John hopes to appreciate his grandpa for who he is.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541168237
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	12/16/2016
Pages:	270
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.61(d)

About the Author

Paul Schumacher lives in Colorado with his wife, Gail, and their three children. He has authored more than twenty technical papers and is an inventor on more than forty patents. Basically, he loves to write. The Tattered Box is his first novel.

Editorial Reviews

2017-03-02
A teenager travels back to 1941 and encounters his grandfather in this YA debut. It's 2004. John, age 18, is mostly uninterested when his elderly grandfather presents him with a mysterious box one day: "The box was timeworn and resembled a long-lost treasure chest….The musty smell was of a rarely opened attic, and it had a curved top like a prop from an old pirate movie." John is disappointed that the items contained within don't possess much monetary value, but he nevertheless sticks the thing in his baseball bag before heading to his game. Later, after being struck in the head by a fly ball, John wakes up on the field of a different game: one that took place in 1941 that his grandfather has been telling John about all his life. John meets his grandfather's younger self, Bill, and gets to know him as a peer. What's more, John gets to live in his same house—it was standing back in 1941—but with an entirely different family. One that includes (unlike John's 2004) a loving father. With his grandfather at his side, John gets to experience what being a teenager was like back in the early '40s: both the things that were different and the things that never change. "I always assumed school was the same no matter which decade I attended," John observes. "Boy was I wrong." He also gets to see a side of his grandfather that he's never observed before. Schumacher tells his story in clear prose, and John's first-person narrative is buoyed by an infectious enthusiasm for the world around him. The objects in the grandfather's box are used as representative totems to unlock different avenues in the tale, and the author makes good use of his setting, which successfully conjures a small Midwestern town right on the cusp of World War II. The novel does not drift far from the expected path, and the ending is a bit formulaic. But overall the book is a pleasant exploration of familial bonds across generations and the timelessness of youth. A well-crafted, if conventional, time-travel tale.

Kirkus Reviews