Well, for starters, it might have been nice had she not injured her foot on landing. Second, things are way different some 500 years in the past, and Charley is in no way dressed as to be inconspicuous. On the upside, Kairos is back to fill in the gaps for the very confused da Vinci, and he will help with Charley's odd transition into the past.
She soon discovers that there are people here who mirror her friends back home, such as Elisabetta or "Bethy II," who is prissy and concerned with boys, just like Charley's former bestie, Beth. But Charley has bigger matters to be concerned about, such as angering the great and powerful Lorenzo de' Medici, which she does accidentally. If she isn't careful, she could end up stuck here forever, or worse, dead for saying or doing the wrong thing.
To complicate everything that much more, Charley's mom is in Florence right now, in the current timeline, and for some strange reason, Charley can see the video chats she is making on her tablet, first as she reveals to a friend that she is very sick, then as she and Charley's father are frantically searching for her. Will Charley ever get home and will it be in time to see her Mom before something worse happens? Only time will tell.
Once again, I found Charley's character saying and doing things that seemed a bit odd for someone her age. She is supposed to be super intelligent and fascinated by da Vinci's time and his body of work, yet she doesn't think twice about mouthing off a feminist comment to the leader of Florence? Perhaps she is just a teen ruled by emotions, but I found it a little silly. Also, there's the fact that Charley is constantly showing da Vinci his paintings and inventions before their time and seems to have no concern whatsoever for disrupting the space time continuum, at least until a great work of art begins to disappear from her tablet. I thought Charley was supposed to be a braniac?!?
Further, once more there is a lot of dialogue that is written in Italian and it is not always explained. Personally, I like to know what is going on and it is a turn off when books have a good bit of unexplained foreign language in them. I don't feel like having to look things up to get their meaning on a continual basis, and instead, there were just some points where I just caught the meaning contextually, but it was still bothersome.
Lastly, once again, there are a number of words that the author, Robin Stevens Payes, tends to explain using paretheses in a conversational fashion and I found these odd, since there were other, more uncommon words that she used in the book that were not explained. Also, when Charley messages back to Billy across time, she keeps referring to the Space-Time Dimension and calls it STD. Like she uses phrases such as, "Believe it or not, same STD." I am pretty sure a teen knows that common vernacular for STD is NOT Space-Time Dimension and it seemed an odd choice, even for a nerd.
Overall, I have a hard time recommending Da Vinci's Way. I applaud Ms. Payes' attempt to inject science in an adventure that is focused on a teen girl, but personally, I just didn't really enjoy the story and the flow of Charley's antics.
