Book #89 of 2024: The Book of Doors by Gareth Brown I love the initial premise of this novel, and I still feel like many of its subsequent elements have some potential charm to them. But the execution is beyond abysmal, beginning with the heroine with a severe case of written-by-a-man-itis: “She caught her reflection …
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Book #83 of 2024: The Day Tripper by James Goodhand An interesting time-travel premise bogged down by an unlikable protagonist and a few unresolved logistical issues. Following a traumatic head injury, our hero begins bouncing around his personal timeline, waking up each morning at some new point in his future — never earlier than when …
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Book #78 of 2024: The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard An astonishing debut novel that introduces one of the most original conceptions of time travel that I’ve ever encountered, yet then wisely waits to fully deploy it until the very end. For the majority of the plot, we are instead lingering in the present …
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Book #98 of 2023: Orion in the Dying Time by Ben Bova (Orion #3) This time-travel adventure sequel offers probably the most problematic of its saga’s dabbles in what the back of this book calls ‘speculative theology,’ taking as its premise the wild notion that the ancient Egyptian god Set is the same being as …
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Book #94 of 2023: Flux by Jinwoo Chong This sci-fi novel gets stronger as it goes along, yet it’s still weirder and more confusing than it needs to be. The full premise isn’t nailed down until fairly late in the text, but generally speaking, it’s the story of a queer Asian American whose amoral employers …
Book #53 of 2023: The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England by Brandon Sanderson [Disclaimer: I am Facebook friends with this author.] This is the second of author Brandon Sanderson’s four “Secret Project” novels, which he wrote over the pandemic lockdowns of 2020-2021 in the time he’d normally spend traveling and making public appearances …
Book #169 of 2022: Long Division by Kiese Laymon This 2013 authorial debut has some interesting ideas and a distinctive voice for its protagonist(s), but it strikes me as overall too jumbled and underdeveloped to land with much impact. The plot, as I understand it: a young Black teen in the modern age, struggling with …
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Book #132 of 2022: Wrong Place Wrong Time by Gillian McAllister This time-travel novel honestly struck me as a little gimmicky at first, and I’m not sure we ever do get to know the heroine’s son well enough for his actions in the opening chapter to make complete sense. But I found myself getting more …
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Book #120 of 2022: The Paradox Hotel by Rob Hart The Paradox is a hotel for the clients of the world’s only time travel agency, which the government runs next door, and January Cole is its head of security — which means that in addition to all the regular service industry headaches, she also has …
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Book #99 of 2022: This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub This novel is pretty good, but it’s a little short and takes too much of its limited space to actually get to the point. It’s a time travel story about a forty-year-old woman who discovers a way to revisit her sixteenth birthday, but she doesn’t …
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