Bound To Stay Bound

Booklist - 02/01/2019 Van Booy positively shovels random—or, at best, loosely connected—elements into this dizzying sequel to Gertie Milk & the Keeper of Lost Things? (2017). Embracing her new mission to restore historically misplaced articles that have gathered on Skuldark Island, Gertie travels repeatedly through time to return, for instance, a dish of radium salts to Marie Curie, and a Cherokee syllabary to Sequoyah. In between jaunts, she also enjoys piloting a WWII Spitfire, fends off a plague of scurrying robot hands, survives a stampede of giant prehistoric tapirs, has misadventures with shrinking and growing powders (shades of Lewis Carroll!), and helps to dispose of a ticking bomb massive enough to blow Skuldark to kingdom come. The title actually anticipates the next episode, as here Gertie only gathers a few initial clues to the locations of other Keepers that the rival Losers (a band of time travelers determined to keep lost things lost) have stranded in diverse eras and locales. In context, that doesn’t even seem particularly odd for such a set of surreal, if adventuresome, set pieces. - Copyright 2019 Booklist.