LAR'S LIBRARY: MY REVIEW OF MARGARET PETERSON HADDIX'S "RUNNING OUT OF TIME"

RUNNING OUT OF TIME. By Margaret Peterson Haddix. Scholastic, 2004 (originally published 1995). 184 pages. M. Shyamalan’s The Village has a plotline suspiciously close to Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Running Out of Time. A nineteenth century backwoods settlement is completely artificial; we’re actually in the present. When a medical emergency prompts residents to seek a twentieth century cure, a young girl is asked to escape the guarded perimeter of her make-believe world. Despite the striking resemblances, the film’s producers called charges of plagiarism “meritless.” Haddix and her publishers considered litigation, then didn’t bother suing, probably because The Village was less than wildly successful, to put it charitably. All a fascinating sidelight, but not one that really matters when you’re reading Haddix’s debut novel. The author of the fabulous Shadow Children series has written a novel far superior, not to mention slightly more plausible, than Shyamalan’s humorless clunker of a movie. Since Running Out of Time is aimed at an audience that is willing to suspend disbelief, readers might excuse the lack of planes flying overhead. Or the children of the ersatz 1840s Clifton, Indiana, not wondering about the cameras in the trees. Unlike The Village, the town in Running Out of Time is not a thought-control experiment. Instead it’s a tourist attraction that’s morphed into a study of immunology. The conspiracy, and conspirators, behind the artifice are more down-to-earth and realistic. What really distinguishes Running Out of Time, as in the Shadow Children books, is its utterly true and finely drawn child protagonist. Jessie Keyser is a resourceful, yet vulnerable, kid, with the same sources of strength, and the same insecurities, as seventh and eighth graders in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her encounters with adults and other children carry a straightforward verisimilitude. Jessie runs into all kinds of suspenseful action as she, like all children coming of age, searches for truth in an untruthful society imperfectly managed by its elders. And, like all childhood heroes should do, she saves the day. Recommended for fifth graders on up.