1972. Bodichon College. The scratching of a needle on vinyl. The crackling voice resolves from static. The radio is on. The show begins. Reader—you’re home again. Brace yourself, Bean fans. We’re headed back to the Age of Aquarius. Get ready to re-immerse yourself in Christine Potter’s tapestry of past reality we recall so well from TIME RUNS AWAY WITH HER and IN HER OWN TIME. There’s the music, the politics, the fading innocence of characters mirrored in a society undergoing the same change, the often quiet warmth of settings established by an author who lives in her world while she writes it. BUT … there’s the 19th century, too, the wreck of old buildings, past lives, secrets buried in time. All is not safe for Rebecca “Bean” Donahue—nor is it for many of the characters we’ve come to know and welcome into our Kindle like friendly seasonal ghosts. Bean and Zak have separated—bizarre—and our hero has aged somewhat, testing dangerous waters with often questionable choices and relationships: like with this character Josh, whom the reader immediately recognizes as an insufferable ego-driven doofus from the time we meet him, even as it takes Bean a little while to get there. Zak and Sam and Suzanne aren’t immediately present in this story. We miss them right away. We’re worried and frustrated—and you know what? That’s just how good Christine Potter is, how invested we are with her world … and before you get too upset and inadvertently heave gak into the sink, don’t worry too much. The author ultimately delivers on everything we, the readers, want—in her own time. (See what I did there?) What’s in the letters, Bean? Bean, you’re killing me. Listen to Amp. Come to your senses … (Sorry. I’m just remembering my first experience with this book. I’m having flashbacks. Potter does this to me, you understand.) The plot darkens and expands in WHAT TIME IS IT THERE? Apart from the forward momentum of this story, which introduces some pretty terrifying supernatural elements (again, no spoilers) and takes us to some pretty uncertain precipices that are simply rife with cracking and crumbling suspense, there’s also a bit of a backstory being filled in. It’s very gradual, peeling away in layers to keep us guessing, interspersed with rich and loving and fun character interaction—until the fit hits the shan again, so to speak. Time travel! Tarot reading! Ancient musical compositions! Mausoleum battles! Popcorn! Pizza! And all the singing and music and groovi-ness—a storm of nostalgia and story—that we’ve come to expect from this wondrous series. Something old, something new—the continuation of a tale that grows in imaginativeness with each installment. Christine Potter has done it again. Find out WHAT TIME IS IT THERE, reader. You’ll be so glad you did.

Before I started reading What Time Is It There?, I wondered whether I would find it easy to get into the story in this third book of Christine Potter’s “Bean Books” series. I needn’t have worried at all. Potter is a skillful storyteller, and she knows how grab readers new and old. The back story of Bean, the novel’s college-age female protagonist, is recapped just enough, in a gradual unfolding that keeps us turning pages (or rather, in my case, tapping my e-reader). The plot device of time travel, while it’s a standard element of a certain kind of genre fiction, also works excellently well at creating surprise and keeping the scene fresh; just when the ’70s details might start to pall, we’re pleasantly startled with a shift to the grandeur of the late 19th century. The element of demon-haunting, which we come to understand gradually—the way we’d work out the crime in an Agatha Christie novel--is the spice of threat that keeps everything moving, and the religious combat against it is a comforting resolution. I confess that young Bean and her gang of college friends have a special pull on me, for whom the experience of college in the ’70s was lived reality. The careful descriptions of those clothes, the allusions to the politics of the time, and the names of all those bands and songs spun on the college radio station by Bean and her fellow DJs occasionally drew me out of that plot and back into my own. But good storytelling pulled me back in quickly. So even though the book is designed to appeal to young adult readers, and even though YA fiction is very different from what I usually read, this non-young adult found the book appealing in a great many ways.