Tag: time travel

Blurb Book Review: The In-Between Bookstore by Edward Underhill (spoilers ahead)

~ Robin James ~ Leave a comment

Cover image from Goodreads.com

Darby is annoyed with New York and suddenly unemployed. On the cusp of his thirtieth birthday and unsure of what to do with his life, he decides to move back to his hometown of Oak Falls, Illinois to help his mom move out of his childhood home and into a new condo. Once at Oak Falls, he visits the beloved bookstore he worked at as a teen. He steps inside to see everything is exactly the same, from the hand-lettered signs to the musty smell of books. Most shocking is the teen behind the counter, who looks exactly like he did back in 2009, some sixteen years ago.

Faced with the opportunity to change his present by talking to his past self, he’s got to figure out how to talk to his younger self before this connection vanishes forever.

The novel had me at time travel. I love the idea of being able to visit my younger self and maybe even help my past self realize some things that would definitely help my present self, just like Darby. I liked the transitions from past to present and how Darby’s entire focus was on trying to connect with his past self without seeming creepy or weird.

The theme was connection, broken or strong, between people. Darby has the chance to repair the relationship between him and his best friend from high school, a breakup that mystified Darby until nearly the end of the novel.

Another theme is acceptance. Darby is trans and having the opportunity to see how his hometown accepts him for who he is right now was well done. While New York might have a stronger LGBTQ+ community, there was one in Oak Falls as well. Eventually, Darby needs to make a choice: stay in Oak Falls or move back to New York where he’s carved out a life.

Overall, this novel was sweet and endearing. Darby is believable and so is time travelling by stepping through the door of a bookstore.

Blurb Book Review: The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes (spoilers ahead)

~ Robin James ~ Leave a comment

Cover taken from Google.com

I’d seen the miniseries before I read the book so I had some idea of what to expect. Still, I was pleasantly surprised.

The primary character is Harper, a man who’s down on his luck in the early 1930s. He steals a coat with a key in the pocket and is inexplicably drawn to a shuttered, ramshackle house in Chicago. Inside, the house is luxurious, except for the body on the staircase. He can see the beauty because he has the key.

The secondary character is Kirby, a woman who is brutally attacked while walking her dog. Her attacker is Harper, who met her when she was a little girl, then again about two decades later.

An unexpected character is the House. It has a kind of interdimensional travel ability for the person with the key. Harper can think up a time, open the front door, and walk out into that time period. The House also calls to Harper to complete a circle of killings and leave a memento from a different time, and different murder, on the fresh body.

But what happens when the circle is complete? Harper desperately wants to know, he’s driven to completing the killings to ease the House’s invasion of his mind. But Kirby lives through her attempted murder, thus leaving the circle incomplete.

The author did a fabulous job in worldbuilding. Each time period felt wonderfully authentic. Even Harper’s reaction to the future was believable. Also, the author did a great job in completing the narrative circle and tying up loose ends. The body on the staircase is explained, eventually, and the ending brings the reader back to the beginning.

Where the author failed, though, is in solving the murders. The reader knows Harper committed the crimes but Kirby and a detective don’t ever find out what’s going on. Kirby almost does. She has an inkling that seems too farfetched to be real and is almost given the payoff of understanding and knowing how it all ties together, but not quite. So while the main story is tied up, the character’s searching is left open, which was frustrating.

Overall, the book is worth reading even after watching the series.

Blurb Book Review: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel (spoilers ahead)

~ Robin James ~ Leave a comment
Cover image from the usual place: Goodreads.com

It’s been a while since I read a book. I’ve been working on a synopsis for my novel and I must say, that document was harder to write than the actual book.

Like previous books by this author, this novel tells the story in alternating points of view that are woven together. By the end, everything is tied up in neat little knots, which is something I admire.

This book is about time travel and how one person, Zoey, believes they are living in a simulation because of an anomaly that happens where three timelines overlap briefly. At first, the reader is led to believe the anomaly is caused by a maple tree, the location of the two earlier timelines. This turns out not to be the case.

The time travel aspect of the book is one where no matter what you do to alter the past, you have done already. Gaspery doesn’t follow instructions and ends up creating the very anomaly he’s investigating. If he hadn’t created it, he wouldn’t need to investigate it.

Thankfully, the book doesn’t go into any technical discussion about time travel or physics, instead it’s more of a backdrop to the exploration of how our actions have consequences and how we’re frequently unaware of what ripples we’re creating.

Good book, definitely in line with the others the author has written.

Blurb Book Review: One Word Kill by Mark Lawrence (spoilers ahead)

~ Robin James ~ Leave a comment
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Oh look – an image from Goodreads.com!

I didn’t know this book was the first of a series, but I’ll be reading the other two as soon as possible now.

Nick is in his teens when he’s diagnosed with leukemia. He begins his chemo while still maintaining his weekly D&D games with his friends. Just after the chemo starts, a girl named Mia joins the group. Nick is visited by a man, who turns out to be himself from the future, asking him to complete a mission so he can save Future Mia.

Well told, nice integration of D&D playing and real life adventure. The author does a wonderful job of intertwining the two while still keeping it believable. This book is a fantastic mix of nostalgia and hope for the future.

Even the time travel made sense and was explained in a way that was satisfying and simple. There’s also a couple of good gut punches and twisty bits, enough to keep the ending a nice surprise.

It’s a short book, a little under 200 pages, and well worth the read.

Blurb Book Review: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu (spoilers ahead)

~ Robin James ~ Leave a comment
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Did I get the image from Goodreads.com? Of course!

This is a story of living in boxes, or self-contained units. The story loops around and around between memory in the narrator’s head and memory he re-lives by visiting with his time machine.


Charles repairs time machines for a living. This doesn’t really satisfy him, but it’s work. He and his dad invented a time machine but that model failed. His dad has gone missing and Charles doesn’t quite know how to look for him, until he encounters himself and starts a time loop.

In this loop, Charles revisits memories of his dad and the building of the time machine. By watching these memories like an observer peeking through a window, Charles comes to understand his dad as a person, not just a parental figure. He watches his dad’s device fail when it’s demonstrated to a bigwig. What Charles knows, but his dad didn’t in that moment, was that another device was created and worked. Now people can travel back and forth in time as a form of recreation.

Charles’ dad spent all his free time in his garage building a machine that would allow him to spend more time doing what he wanted. His dad was insulted at the idea that each moment only comes once and can only be experienced once, so he designs a device that allows the person to revisit events, like how memory works. Ironically, his son spends a decade of his time in between times. He’s jammed the shifter in Present-Infinite where he just hovers and doesn’t move forward or backward.

This could be an allegory to how people hover in time by scrolling through websites, visiting social media, watching television or movies, or playing mindless games on their phones. When doing this, people aren’t engaging with their lives, they’re allowing their lives to slip past them, they’re hovering in between tasks, in between events, in between duties, just like Charles in his personal time travel box.

Charles’ mom is also stuck in a time loop, this one bought and paid for by Charles. In it, she makes dinner over and over and over again to feel helpful and useful, as her husband is missing. She designed the loop and visits the loop often, but also indicates that she’d like to be free of it.

Charles finds his dad in the past, which could be an example of dementia. He was unable to rescue himself and needed someone else to come get him.

Overall, the book was confusing, but good. At times it rambled on and felt repetitive, but that’s how memories are. I’d recommend this book to anyone who enjoys time loop stories, albeit this one is told in a more relaxed plot structure.

Blurb Book Review: The Future is Yours by Dan Frey (spoilers ahead)

~ Robin James ~ Leave a comment
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Where did the image come from? Goodreads.com!

I’ve got a system now. I put a book on hold at the library and when I pick it up I don’t read the blurb. Instead, I open the book and start reading. I try to figure out what the book is about based on the cover and note how long it took before I could figure out the premise.

This one I got right away. The text is the green of old computer text, the last two words are broken, and there’s a clock in the upper left corner. I figured it was time travel, involved computers, and was broken. I was pretty much right.

This is an epistolary novel – one written in a series of documents. In particular: emails, texts, social media posts, articles, and congressional hearing notes. Normally this format wouldn’t appeal to me but time travel is my jam so I read on. Also, I was drawn in immediately. The premise was given in the opening document’s first few lines: “IT WORKS! Seriously, you did it.” and goes on to say this is an email sent from future Ben to past Ben. So there we have it: time travel and future. But the reader knows it’s broken because of the text.

Ben and his friend Adhvan develop a quantum computer that can see one year into the future. They call the company The Future and plan to sell units to the population. The novel doesn’t go into too much detail about what can go wrong, but it does touch on a few things like the future of sports at risk because people can see the end result of the game in advance, the military wants the technology because of course they do, and being able to see your own future.

Ben and Adhvan test their technology out by finding a local news story and trying to prevent the death of someone. This fails. The future, it appears, is set. But as the novel progresses the future becomes unstable. Discrepancies start popping up, between what the prototype computer revealed at different times. The reader finds out why at the end and when it’s revealed some other things fall into place.

The author made time travel remarkably easy for me to follow. Much of the time I’m along for the ride but I can barely comprehend the plot, consequences, or technology. In this novel, I could understand all of that. The plot itself is simple, thankfully, and resolves well.

The author also dealt with exposition exceptionally well. Normally there’d be infodumps or exposition as dialogue as characters explain time travel to each other so the reader can understand it. But here, because the format is documents, the exposition was kept at a minimum and infodumps were inferred. All the emails read like emails and all the texts read like texts between friends. The congressional hearing documents read as I’d expect a transcript to read. The author also managed to keep the character’s voices distinct by demonstrating how they formatted emails, worded texts, and used all caps in addition to their choice of words and sentence structure.

I’d recommend this book to anyone. This is a good entry-level time travel book, a good primer before getting into some seriously confusing novels.