Reading it again decades later, it isn't hard to see why. I only read it once but what an effect it had on me. This was one of THE books of my childhood. The author offers a salutary warning at the end of the book that the characters are not participating in sceances or the like, but in meditation and memory-like experiences. I have to therefore suspect it's more an adult novel than a YA one. Or at least been excessively uncomfortable with it. Today I find it profound but I think I'd have loathed it as a teenager. It disturbed me and I disliked it intensely. However - the interesting thing about rereading this story was remembering what I felt about it two decades ago. And it's too late to back out.Ī powerful story, deeply touching and satisfying. Soon that nightmarish past comes to inhabit their present. Soon Juniper's experiment takes a dark turn - and she pulls a reluctant Dylan into exploring what she's always wanted to prove: that the past, specifically the medieval past in which they are both interested, is part of the eternal NOW. It doesn't take Juniper more than one session to realise she's hit the jackpot: Dylan can indeed mentally receive the 'picture' she focuses on at the appointed time. He sits alone in her attic and draws whatever comes to mind at a specific time. When she discovers that Dylan, the class nerd, has massive artistic talent, she invites him over to her place to take part in an experiment.ĭylan is so friendless, he's a pushover to persuade. To test her theory, she's been on the lookout for someone who can draw quite well. She thinks it would be possible - perhaps through some combination of telepathy and access to Jung's 'collective unconscious' to observe the past, not much differently to seeing the present. Juniper has a theory she's always wanted to test: that time in not linear but part of an eternal NOW.

The relationship between Dylan and Juniper is far from normal. She, by contrast, has many - including a handsome boyfriend in the seventh form.

His homework suffers and he's always getting detentions.

He's also got the washing, ironing and other domestic chores to do. When his mother abruptly abandons them, Dylan has to step up and mind his twin sister. Dylan's mother, on the other hand, is a wounded, broken woman who is about to leave because his underemployed father is having an affair. Juniper's mother has a house full of light and imaginative touches as well as a boyfriend who lives in a gypsy caravan. Their home lives couldn't be more different. She's also manipulative.ĭylan is creative, artistic, withdrawn, nerdish and desperately lonely. Juniper is beautiful, brilliant, bubbling with vitality, buoyant with theories about life and immensely popular at school.

The Juniper Game by Sherryl Jordan