Running Out of Time

         I decided to attempt the Passport Challenge in 2023, though I focused mainly on books set in each state of the United States versus other countries.  Despite reading over 340 books in 2023, I didn’t make it to each state.  I needed a book set in Indiana, so I scoured the interwebs and picked this one because I have previously enjoyed Margaret Peterson Haddix’s books.  In an incredibly narcissistic move, I felt like a young adult novel would be an easy, quick book for me sto blast through.  I was correct.

            This book starts with a small community in the 1800s grappling with the crippling effects of diphtheria.  Children were getting sick and dying, and the doctor, who had previously provided the town with pills to make everybody better, suddenly stopped providing the pills.  Jessie’s mother sent her on what seemed like an impossible mission: to essentially travel into the future and get help.  What Jessie soon discovers is that their idyllic village is not living in the 1800s, but as a hokey tourist attraction for people at the end of the 20th century.  Jessie attempts to hunt down help, and discovers that their little town was actually the experiment of a mad scientist and some money-hungry investors.  Eventually, Jessie is able to get the help her town needed and the bad guys are dealt with. 

            What struck me was how similar, if not downright identical, to M. Night Shyamalan’s movie, The Village.  Quick refresher: in The Village, a young blind girl is sent on a mission to find the edges of her community, which also happens to be a sequestered hamlet pretending to be in the 1800s while actually existing in modern times.  This girl’s mission was also to find medical assistance for sick kids.  While the reasons for the secluded villages were a tad different, the stories were, essentially, exactly the same. 

            I then did some interwebs sleuthing and found that at no point did Shyamalan ever reference Haddix or this book…he didn’t claim The Village to be based on this novel, nor was Haddix ever credited.  Haddix never made an attempt to bring a lawsuit against Shyamalan either, despite the two being the same story and Haddix’s version being quite a few years older.  I have enjoy Shyamalan’s storytelling abilities, but after reading this book, I now question how many other stories he’s stolen.  My respect for him waned drastically after reading this book, and I don’t think he’ll ever regain that from me. 

            This is a genuinely good book, and it does bring about ethical questions behind some medical-based experiments.  Whether that’s a good conversation starter with a bunch of middle-grade kids is another question (I’d say yes, but there are many who would disagree, so I’ll just let everybody ponder that one on their own).  I appreciate young adult novels that make kids think, and this one is a prime example.