Tanglewreck by Jeanette WintersonBloomsbury, 2006

Lighthousekeeping is the story of an orphan named Silver. Tanglewreck is also the story of an orphan named Silver. It’s a story about duty, hope, multiplicity, possibility. Possibility: the Silver of Tanglewreck as the Silver of Lighthousekeeping, elsewhere in the multiverse? “There are Lighthousekeepers and Lock Keepers, and Housekeepers […] and there are Timekeepers.” (p 397). This is a story about time, a clock called the Timekeeper and Silver’s quest to find it: it’s a story about how the future isn’t set, about the different paths that fork off. (It’s also a story about love.) Tanglewreck is a smart book: it quotes “To His Coy Mistress” and literalizes Schrödinger’s cat, refers to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, namedrops historical figures from John Dee to Stephen Hawking. The story’s archetypal but veers into cliché—a reference to The Lord of the Rings that’s too heavy-handed, the nasty villainess and her experiments on children (too much like Philip Pullman’s Mrs. Coulter? but then of course, there’s always a serpent, always a temptress), but past the middle of the book Winterson’s prose turns fluid, more like her books for adults (because, after all, the story’s about familiar things: love, multiplicity, possibility), and reading it is, overall, a delight.