Coinkeeper

“The Avery Chronicles” is a hi-lo time slip fantasy series aimed at middle school students who are either reluctant readers or who are reading below their expected reading level. In the opening book, readers meet the series’ two central characters, 11-year-old Avery and his grandfather, with the latter being the object of community derision because of his appearance and the crazy stories he tells. Another oddity about Grandpa is that he always carries a bag of clanking coins on his belt strap. Avery, who lives with his mother, has two sisters and six brothers, and he shares his bedroom with two of his younger brothers. Grandpa, however, lives in a shed on the property, a shed that he keeps locked when he is absent. For some unknown reason, Avery’s mother appears to have an antagonistic relationship with her father, and Avery seems to be the only one in the family who has a relationship with the old man and time for his stories.

Prior to the book’s action, it appears that Grandpa has either gone missing or is dead because:

On the day my grandpa left, he paid off my mom’s house and gave her so much money that she would never ever have to worry.

Mom said he also went to a lawyer and set up a trust, whatever that means, so that our house would belong to our family forever.

My mom assumed that he’d died, and she said his secrets went to the grave with him.

However, Avery recalls that some months earlier Grandpa had shared some of his secrets with him, including the history of the bag of coins Grandpa always carries with him. According to Grandpa’s telling, a long ago, a king had given a farmer a bag filled with coins as a reward for the farmer’s having saved the king’s only son from drowning. Prior to the gifting, the king had taken the bag to a wizard who cast a spell on it. Anyone can hear the coins jingling, but, if they were to look inside the bag, it would appear empty. However, if the bag’s owner reached inside, he would pull out just one coin and never the same coin. That coin becomes the vehicle for sending its possessor to some period and location in the past. Since the time of the bag’s origins, it has been passed on to the previous owner’s first-born son, but, since Grandpa’s only child was Avery’s mother, Grandpa tells Avery that he will eventually become the bag’s owner. Whether Avery comes to see possessing the bag as being a gift or a curse will be, according to Grandpa, for Avery to decide. However, before Avery inherits the bag and becomes the “coinkeeper”, his grandfather says that he must learn some lessons connected to its ownership, with one being, “We don’t pick the coins. The coins pick us”, and another, “Just remember that once you’ve taken a coin, you must keep that coin right with you, until you’re ready to come back home. You can’t lose the coin, or you might never return.”

Part of the storyline of this first volume in the series consists of Avery’s recalling a story told by his grandfather. “One of the first times I [Grandpa] pulled a coin, it was a 1911 Canadian Silver Dollar....My travels took me way back to a time when the first white people had begun to arrive in the Okanagan Valley, in the early 1800s.” Almost two-thirds of the book is devoted to these six years Grandpa spent with the syilx, “a First Nations people”. Though Grandpa was magically able to speak the Syilx language, saying, “I would help the syilx and the white people speak to each other”, readers never actually see any interaction between the two groups. Author Schapansky does a lot of “telling” in this section, and the most that readers may come away with from Grandpa’s “story” is perhaps some understanding of the Syilx people’s relationship with water. Avery, on the other hand, learns that Grandpa’s half dozen years spent in the past (see Excerpt) were not matched by an equivalent amount of time happening in the present. With the story over, Grandpa sends Avery back to the house and to bed. This portion of the book ends with, “To be continued...”.

The book concludes with two “Extra Reading” sections. The first, four pages in length, relates the history of the 1911 Canadian silver dollar. The information, supplied by the Bank of Canada, is accompanied by black and white photos of the coin’s obverse and reverse. The second section, three pages long, consists of information provided by the Sncawips Heritage Museum. Given that this series was supposed to be directed at struggling readers, this “extra reading”, especially the coin portion, needed to be rewritten in much more user-friendly language.

As a genre, time-slip fantasies generally conform to a number of conventions, with one of them being that the person going into the past is going to play more than a passive observer role in that setting and that her/his actions will somehow impact that person’s situation in the present. Grandpa comes across more as a tourist than a participant. Time-slip fantasies also require a “device” to facilitate the time travel, and Schapansky utilizes a coin drawn from the bag. Regular readers of the genre, however, would question why Schapansky chose a specific coin that did not exist in the historical period to which Grandpa was sent. Though the coin’s role in sending Grandpa into the past is clear, how he returns to the present is not. Does Grampa play an active role in triggering his return, or is he just subject to the coin’s whim?

Book 1 of “The Avery Chronicles” is thin in terms of both plot and theme, and it is needlessly over-burdened by characters who play no role, specifically Avery’s eight siblings. The reasons for Avery’s mother’s animosity towards her father may be explained in future volumes along with why there is no mention of Avery’s father.

An unusual and perhaps confusing aspect of this series is that each and every book has exactly the same title, Coinkeeper, with the distinguishing visual features among the different volumes being their cover art and the book number following the series’ name. With “The Avery Chronicles” already serving as the linking element, Schapansky lost an opportunity to entice readers into reading further volumes through creating individual book titles that could have hinted at each book’s contents.