Ratings

Content Ratings based on a 0-5 scale where
0 = no objectionable content and
5 = an excessive or disturbing level of content

Guide to Rating System

LANGUAGE

VIOLENCE

SEXUAL CONTENT

ADULT THEMES

Ratings Explanation

Language:  The words “hell” (“Go to hell”) and “hellish” used only a few times.  “Damnation” used once in a poem.

Violence:  Zo slashes Dante across his arm with a switchblade; blood soaks his shirt.  Abby slaps Zo as hard as she can; he gets very physically aggressive but doesn’t hurt her.  A few intense fight-like scenes by the riverbank.

Adult Themes:  The rock band Zero Hour intentionally projects the same effect on its audience as drugs would; people experience emotional highs, lows, and hangovers from its intensity.  Dante and the band members are all accused or convicted war criminals from 16th century Italy.  At the Dungeon, a teenage hangout, the owner Leo gives Abby a drink concocted of mysterious ingredients that have a profound effect on her mind and psyche.

Sexual Content:  Nothing beyond a kiss, however, Dante and Abby exchange many and they are described in intimate (albeit cliche) detail:  “…he kissed me,  his lips at once hard and fierce and yet still gentle and insistent.”  “I could taste the softness of his lips. . . I ran my fingers through the curls at the nape of his neck into his hair at the same time he slid his hands down to lock at the small of my back.  His fingers left tracks of heat in their wake.”  etc.  A lot of that going on.  In the scene where Dante is slashed, he removes his shirt in front of Abby, and she “drank in the sight of his long, lean body.”

Synopsis

Abby Edmunds seems to have the quaint, perfect life going on:  good family, good grades, nice boyfriend who lives next door, but it’s all a little bit too predictable for her.  Then one day, a mysterious, tall, dark, and exotically handsome exchange student from Italy walks into her life.  Meet Dante Alexander, who seems to be the polar opposite of her boyfriend, Jason.  He is spontaneous and charismatic and speaks with an accent, and Abby can’t help feeling attracted to him.  Time literally seems to stop when she is with him.  But Dante is hiding some dark secret, and Abby is willing to risk the status quo to find out what it is:  that Dante is actually an exiled prisoner from 16th century Italy who apprenticed with Leonardo da Vinci.  Under da Vinci’s tutelage, Dante learned the secret to the most dangerous thing da Vinci [supposedly] ever invented, a time machine through which the Italian government sent war criminals into the future to be punished.  Now Dante, who was wrongly convicted, is living in 2009 and trying to stop three other Italian thugs, members of a rock band named Zero Hour, from finding a way back through the time-space continuum and changing history.  But he is also inlove with Abby, who happens to hold the key to unlocking the Hourglass Door back through time.

The storyline here is a familiar one: boy meets girl, boy is hiding some unfathomable secret, girl unlocks secret, girl can’t help falling inlove and risking everything to help boy overcome his demons (real or otherwise).  Yet even with such a familiar premise, Ms. Mangum’s first book is intriguing enough to keep the reader turning the pages and ending on a cliffhanger note, tempting you with the sequel.  The romance hovers dangerously close to the cheese factor, however, for me.  By book’s end I had had more than my fair share of intertwining fingers and lips and penetrating gazes.   The Hourglass Door is part one in a three-part trilogy (book two, The Golden Spiral, was released in May 2010).