This is going to be one of my favorite books of the this year. This book is for book lovers, for people who love stories. There is a lot of intertextuality as well as it's a good story on its own. Ali always sets her novels in the present, but history transcends the story. So if we talk about a present, we also talk about everything that came until now and how we got to be and to live in this now. “Time travel is real, Daniel said. We do it all the time. Moment to moment, minute to minute.” In this novel we focus on two main characters: Daniel Gluck and Elisabeth Demand, which are both such great names. We start with Daniel being washed up on the shore on an island. The first line of the book is: “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times”. So we open with this rephrasing of Dickens and also as we move forward through this chapter we get an image of Shakespeare as well. If we think of someone being washed up on an island, we think of plays like “The Tempest” or “The 12th night”. We begin this novel with links to other books, and by this Ali Smith is showing us that books cannot exist on their own, they exist with regard to everything that has come before them. This is a theme that goes throughout the entire novel and it's about Daniel who teaches Elisabeth about the origins of words and how words were invented to suit our purposes throughout time and history. The beginning of the book is also a reference to another well known character and that is Peter Pan. Peter Pan and the timelesness of the island and of the children living there. Ali idealizes the idea of childhood and by going back to the past, we go back to a state of innocence, thus this obsession of youth, another current theme in the book. When Daniel meets Elisabeth he is 80 and she is about 8. He likes to tell her stories about the origins of words like Humpty Dumpty. We have so many references to literature and classic novels, in this case “Alice in Wonderland”, that are woven throughout the entire novel. Another current theme is about changing identities and discovering new identities. In this novel we do not know how the characters look like. So, therefore, it's up to the reader to build up the characters' identity. However, we find these nods related to the characters that make us think how they really look like. The ambiguity of being black or white, between being English or a foreigner is so subtle in this book.
