Root CellarThe Root Cellar, by Janet Lunn • Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1983. 229 pages.

Time is not kind to library books. Their corners and edges get dirty and worn, smudges mysteriously appear on covers and spines and never completely go away.

And then there’s the design of the books themselves. Book covers date so quickly, particularly ones that show kids wearing contemporary clothes (Though now that I think about it, my fashion sense was shaped by the twenty-years-out-of-date clothes featured on the covers of some of my favorite books growing up. Plus classic Doctor Who).

So I worry about the San Francisco Public Library’s copy of The Root Cellar. Published in 1983 and saddled with an (in my opinion) charmingly dated pink and green cover, it sits between two more recently published — and far snazzier looking — books by the same author. Can children look beyond its retro patina and see the wonders within? I hope so. I know I just had to take it home and love it up a bit.

The book tells the story of Rose, an orphan (a red headed orphan, no less!) sent to live with her aunt’s family in southern Ontario after the death of her grandmother. Well cared for but never shown much affection, Rose is initially put off by her aunt and her rambunctious boys, and by the ramshackle old house they all live in. She keeps meeting people that no one else will acknowledge, and who seem to disappear in ways that don’t quite make sense.

Then Rose discovers an old root cellar, and when she comes up, it’s the summer of 1862. She meets Susan and Will, the boy who lives in the house and the hired girl who works there, and as the summer continues, she becomes more and more involved in their lives, two hundred years before her own time.

Reading this book, I felt myself going into a time warp of sorts — I wans’t sure if I’d read it, years ago, or if Ruby and her story just seemed familiar because I’d been reading so many time travel stories of late. Regardless, it was a good story, and well told, with vivid depictions of both the real and present world.

Readers from 3rd grade up to 6th grade, will enjoy this book, particularly fans of Kit Pearson and other purveyors of fantastical stories. Fans of another red-headed Canadian orphan might also enjoy the book — there’s something of Anne in the fantastic stories Rose tells Susan and Will, though in Rose’s case, imagination has nothing to do with it. (Which makes me wonder: is Anne of 2010 AD the next Pride and Prejudice and Zombies?)