From Publishers Weekly
Time travel and its fascinating paradoxes get surprisingly slack treatment in the second episode (after Gunpowder Empire) of Turtledove’s Crosstime Traffic series. Crosstimer Lawrence Gomes, a 21st-century entrepreneur who travels to alternate time lines to trade for goods and services, and his teenage son, Paul, sidestep to a world where Germany won WWI and still dominates the globe. They set up a shop called Curious Notions in San Francisco to sell electronic equipment, but their state-of-the-art wares quickly arouse the suspicions of both the occupying German constabulary and crime lords of the local Chinese triads. Plucky Paul complicates matters when he befriends Lucy Woo, a working girl whose family is inadvertently swept up in their cat-and-mouse game with the authorities. Turtledove does his usual fine job of developing the alternate history, but he lets other details slip: he never explains why Paul and his father, who hope to conduct business unobtrusively, call attention to themselves by selling blatantly futuristic goods, and he makes the Gomes’s German and Chinese pursuers seem so easily outsmarted that the plot never develops tension or suspense. A finale in which Paul is saved from a predicament by miraculous intervention, rather than through his own resourcefulness, may disappoint the target audience of younger readers who might otherwise identify with its teenage hero and his colorful adventures.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
In twenty-first-century San Francisco, Paul Gomes and his father, Lawrence, run a consumer electronics store. There's a catch, however, for theirs is an alternate San Francisco under the occupation of the kaiser's Germany. The Gomeses are from a time line that invented cross-time travel and are trading portable radios and record players for food. But the Germans are growing suspicious, and once the Woo family becomes involved, so do the Chinese tongs or triads, and they are anything but mythical. Since the book's main time line contains the technology to duplicate cross-time devices if their existence were to be learned, the German suspicions put Curious Notions (the name of the Gomeses' shop) in a position of exceptional awkwardness. Paul compounds the situation by getting sweet on Lucy Woo, which leads him to run more risks than he should before his home time line sends in the cavalry. A well-constructed world, superior characterization, and some serious analysis of the ethics of cross-time travel all make the yarn a winner. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
"Readers nostalgic for the juvenile SF novels of Robert A. Heinlein and Andre Norton will find much to enjoy...Turtledove presents his teenaged heroes with a series of moral choices and dilemmas that will particularly resonate with younger fans. This is a rousing story that reminds us that 'adventure' is really someone else in deep trouble a long way off."
--Publishers Weekly on Gunpowder Empire

"Turtledove has proved he can divert his readers to astonishing places...I know I'd follow his imagination almost anywhere." --San Jose Mercury News

"One of alternate history's authentic modern masters." --Booklist

"Harry Turtledove is probably the best practitioner of the classic alternate-history story since L. Sprague de Camp." --Locus



Review
"Readers nostalgic for the juvenile SF novels of Robert A. Heinlein and Andre Norton will find much to enjoy...Turtledove presents his teenaged heroes with a series of moral choices and dilemmas that will particularly resonate with younger fans. This is a rousing story that reminds us that 'adventure' is really someone else in deep trouble a long way off."
--Publishers Weekly on Gunpowder Empire

"Turtledove has proved he can divert his readers to astonishing places...I know I'd follow his imagination almost anywhere." --San Jose Mercury News

"One of alternate history's authentic modern masters." --Booklist

"Harry Turtledove is probably the best practitioner of the classic alternate-history story since L. Sprague de Camp." --Locus



Book Description
In a parallel-world 21st-century San Francisco where the Kaiser's Germany won World War One and went on to dominate the world, Paul Gomes and his father Lawrence are secret agents for our timeline, posing as traders from a foreign land. They run a storefront shop called Curious Notions, selling what is in our world routine consumer technology-record players, radios, cassette decks--all of which is better than anything in this world, but only by a bit. Their real job is to obtain raw materials for our timeline. Just as importantly, they must guard the secret of Crosstime Traffic--for of the millions of parallel timelines, this is one of the few advanced enough to use that secret against us.

Now, however, the German occupation police are harrassing them. They want to know where they're getting their mysterious goods. Under pressure, Paul and Lawrence hint that their supplies comes from San Francisco's Chinese...setting in motion a chain of intrigues that will put the entire enterprise of Crosstime Traffic at deadly risk.



About the Author
Harry Turtledove, "the modern master of alternate history," lives in Los Angeles.

FROM THE PUBLISHER