Kay's Bookshelf

The novel is, for lack of a better word, dark. There are a lot of moments of violence, as the author intended to present the lives of the black slaves back then with the utmost sincerity, without masking anything. Dana herself is being taken by surprise at how violent those times were, and how much real violence differed from the imagined one, or the one on TV. The usual punishment of the time was a savage whipping, degrading and inflicting a lot of pain to the punished one. Dana herself, although a visitor from another time and the main character of the book, is not spared any suffering. While this book has been a less heartbreaking read for me than Uncle Tom’s Cabin (ages ago), it wasn’t an easy one either, and I repeatedly wondered at the

For me (as a white person) it was a bit sad to notice there are no actually good white people all throughout the book, other than Dana’s husband, who comes from a different time than the rest. I am not sure how I feel about this. First of all, it is obvious that all the white people of the 19th century that we get to meet in the book have had a certain kind of upbringing, one that insisted that slaves are nothing more than animals. It is also obvious that a person acting by that time’s standards cannot be considered good by the standards of today. And yet I was a bit sorry to see whites presented in such a cookie cutter manner, unlike the black people who had actual personalities, ranging from the always unpredictable Alice to the subdued Sarah who was always aware what the “masters” can do and as such she was always wary of them.

Although to be completely honest no character is as complex in the whole book as Rufus is. My feelings towards him were just as everyone else’ around him, just as Dana’s: I cared for him, as he had some good moments, but there were also moments when I was horrified by what he could do (to Dana or other people). You know, this alone would be a reason for me to consider Ms. Butler a great writer: the fact that she has created such a conflicting yet very believable character. In a way, Rufus reminded me of Bruno, the German boy in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, because, although older, he was just as oblivious about people’s feelings as nine year old Bruno was. Yet he also had a sort of innocence (or should I call it overconfidence), firmly believing that his choices in matters are the only possible choices (not out of being evil but because that’s the way he was taught), making me care about him even though I didn’t much agree with the way he acted.

I think that this book was, at least partially, the result of the author’s imagining herself in such a strange situation. After all, she was bound to have an interest in slavery, given that she herself has had first hand contact with the mindset of the 1950s (Ms. Butler about the way her mother was treated at work: “I used to see her going in back doors, being talked about while she was standing right there and basically being treated like a non-person, something beneath notice.“). It is obvious that the inspiration for Dana was Ms. Butler’s own life: they both come from a devout Baptist family, Dana also tries to become a writer, taking as many writing classes as possible, they are both from Pasadena, and their ages were similar too (Ms. Butler was 29 in 1976). For some reasons I am always a bit fonder of characters that seem inspired from their author rather than not.

An interesting quote, Dana’s thoughts about Kevin’s (possible) life in the 18th century:

A place like this would endanger him in a way I didn’t want to talk to him about. If he was stranded here for years, some part of this place would rub off on him. No large part, I knew. But if he survived here, it would be because he managed to tolerate the life here. He wouldn’t have to take part in it, but he would have to keep quiet about it. Free speech and press hadn’t done too well in the ante bellum South. Kevin wouldn’t do too well either. The place, the time would either kill him outright or mark him somehow. I didn’t like either possibility.

Thoughts on the ending: Due to the prologue I knew right from the start approximatively how the book will end (it is obvious from the first sentence actually). While I wasn’t surprised when I reached the actual ending, I was happy to discover there is a part of a chapter where Dana and Kevin try to find out the whereabouts of the black people at the Weylin’s farm after Dana left for good. I’m always a fan of these types of endings (when “what happened to them next” is revealed) and of course I liked this one too :)

As a tiny aside, the book is for some reason classified by many as Science Fiction. I really don’t see how that’s the case as no science is ever mentioned, and I think it belongs way better in the Fantasy genre (because of the time travel, of course).

What I liked most: The differences in perception between Dana, the black female, and Kevin, the white male. It is obvious that they both filter whatever they go through according to their knowledge and previous experience, but also according to some very basic elements such as race. Dana feels a lot more powerfully the plights of everyone around her in the 18th century, going so far as becoming a part of them, identifying herself with that group of black people she ended up among, despite the fact that they didn’t have that many things in common other than the skin color. Kevin tends to be more the observer kind, watching the events around him unfold with a detached eye, and it is only natural it should be so because, among other things, he is never in that close contact with the black people as Dana is, he is never “one of them” but “one of the others”. I found these considerations interesting, all the more so because I am not sure I would have thought of them on my own, had the author not had pointed them out.

What I liked least: Once again I am back to the first sentence. I hated hated hated the fact that Dana lost her arm like that — she was so courageous and tried to help everyone around her and to see such a thing happening to her was quite sad. My copy of the book had a commentary on this event, among other things, and whoever wrote it saw this as a strike of genius because it has lots of symbolic meanings (among other things Ruth Salvaggio seems to have said about it that the lost arm is the emblem of Dana’s disfigured heritage). While I do get (parts of) the symbolism the critics are talking about, I still can’t help feeling very sad for Dana’s irreparable loss.

Recommend it to? Anyone. I read this book in just one day, that’s how fascinated I was with it. Be warned though that there are some violent scenes inside.


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Popularity: 16% [?]

This is a children’s book, which means that most characters are quite nice (and no one is actually evil). I for one have very much liked Charlotte, mostly because she seemed to me quite smart to figure it all out, and also because she was quite a proper young lady (that’s the adult in me speaking). I bet I would have liked Clare very much too (although from what Emily said of Clare she was a bit too proper for me to like), however unfortunately the author has chosen to follow Charlotte everywhere she went, so the reader had no chance to know Clare first hand. Other interesting characters were Emily (who was a wee bit too spoiled for me to actually like) and Miss Agnes Chisel Brown (the daughter of the family where Emily and Charlotte lived for a while), a young woman I couldn’t help feeling rather sorry for because she led a seemingly dreary life, the only highlight being her memories of her dead brother Arthur.

A part that I have found most interesting was the one regarding the idea of identity. Lost in a time not her own, Charlotte tries hard to hold onto her idea of self, her knowledge of being Charlotte not Clare. Also, she is always very interested in the way people around them reacted to Charlotte becoming Clare and Clare becoming Charlotte, because one would expect that anyone knowing one of them would realize that something was wrong the very moment the switch happened. And yet it seems like no one ever suspects the change, at least not at first, a thing that confuses Charlotte quite a bit. This reminded me in a way of a book I read a while ago (I think it was Terry Pratchett’s) stating that people only see what they expect to be seeing, and they sort of imagine away the rest — precisely what happened in this circumstance, with people who expected to see Clare seeing Clare, and people expecting to see Charlotte seeing Charlotte. Speaking of which, I am quite curious actually about how much different were they exactly (from the physical point of view), too bad we are never told (although people who knew them both usually said they were very different, but only after a while).

Two quotes I liked:

“And, she thought, uncomfortably, what would happen if people did not recognize you? Would you know who you were yourself? If tomorrow they started to call her Vanessa or Janet or Elizabeth, would she know how to be, how to feel, like Charlotte? Were you some particular person only because people recognized you as that”

and

“But when she put her fingers into the water and pulled a marble out, it was small by comparison with those still in the glass, and unimportant, too. It was like the difference between what you long for and what you find–the difference, for instance, between Arthur’s image of war and his experience of it.”

Thoughts on the ending: The ending was just as nice as was fitting for such a book and partially predictable too. show spoiler

Also, I was very sad to discover that what I have read is a “revised edition” and it lacks a scene (nothing very important, according to Wikipedia, (show spoiler

What I liked most: I absolutely adore the title :)

The idea of having the two characters try to communicate with one another was also quite cool (too bad it wasn’t expanded on a little).

What I liked least: Too short and a bit too vague? I very much liked this book but I would have loved it to have a bit more “flesh”, to tell us about the experience from other people’s point of view too (Clare’s is the one I was more curious about, since she went into the future not the past).

Recommend it to? Anyone enjoying children’s books. This is a very light volume (I read it in one sitting) but quite enjoyable (albeit I for one would have like a bit more detail hehe).


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Popularity: 13% [?]

Character-wise, I found this book to be an improvement compared to the previous one. There are still some characters (the official, SO-something ones) that I sometimes mix up, but there are also a few strong ones I would recognize anywhere. To my surprise Landen Parke-Laine is one of them: I kinda disliked him in the first book (his being engaged with someone else didn’t help), but here he seems a perfect match for Thursday, sharing her sense of humor and caring for her. Actually, Thursday’s whole family is penned in more detail now, making it easier for me to care from them, starting with Thursday’s pet dodo, Pickwick, who turns out to be a girl when he lays an egg, and ending with her mother that, perhaps not surprisingly, has also been a SO-3 officer (higher in rank than Thursday) and still works for them now and then. The utmost revelation is Granny Next, Thursday’s grandmother, one hundred and eight years old and always on the lookout for the most boring piece of literature ever written, so she could rest in peace already (as she puts it, she “got mixed up with some oddness in my youth and the long and short of it is that I can’t shuffle off this mortal coil until I have read the ten most boring classics“), but other than that a very sharp woman that always gives good advice. One of my favorite characters :)

The author stills seems to have had a lot of fun playing with the details of the book (although there are fewer interesting names): for example, the Jurisfiction members communicate to people in the real world via footnotes, using what they call a footnoterphone; uncle Mycroft’s sons are named Wilbur and Orville (like the Wright brothers); the SO-5 agents assigned to following Thursday around (that mysteriously die every now and then) are named Kannon and Phodder, Dedmen and Walking, and (the ones who actually make it ’til the end) Lamb & Slaughter; a very successful TV show of the time is “65 Walrus Street” (21 Jump Street anyone?); and many many more.

There are two parts of the book I have absolutely fell in love with. One is the part where Thursday finds herself in her memories, because it’s the only place where Landen exists now — my favorite part was where she remembers a day when the two of them (she and Landen) went out to tea and, as she couldn’t remember the people around them, everybody looked about the same, matching Thursday’s image of how a person visiting a tea shop should look. Actually, I loved all the memories where Thursday hasn’t paid attention to people or has forgotten them and because of this they look blurry, with undistinguishable features. It seemed to me quite a cool idea, albeit a slightly predictable one. I have also loved everything related to Thursday’s experiences with the Jurisfiction department, where she gets to know Miss Havisham and a lot more fictional characters, including Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights (who Thursday is told used to appear in movies under the name of Buck Stallion). As in Jane Eyre, the characters in books are shown acting their parts whenever needed, and were free to do what they pleased between chapters — I was very much amused to discover many of them having a penchant for technology/anachronistic devices between chapters (not in the least Miss Havisham who became almost a different person in the close proximity of a powerful engine :) ).

The library where the fictional characters reside (their books actually) is the stuff dreams are made of. With 26 floors above ground and 26 floors below (27 according to certain rumors), all covered in shelves, it contains all the books ever written (reminding me of Heaven in What Dreams May Come), and a few more. The floors below ground contain what is called “The Well of the Lost Plots” (the name of the next book in the series, that I imagine takes place there), because there reside all the ideas that have never made it into a book. As every respectable library this too has a very capable librarian: the Cheshire Cat (or the Cat who used to be Cheshire but, since they moved the boundaries is now Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat). I have to admit I am quite curious to read the sequels and discover what happens next, both in the library and outside it).

NEXT DAY UPDATE: Here’s a quote taken from The Well of Lost Plots explaining the library a lot better:

Doesn’t this sound GREAT?

A quote that somewhat illustrates Mr. Fforde’s idea of changes to a timeline:

I regarded my father as a sort of time-travelling knight errant, but to the ChronoGuard he was nothing less than a criminal. He threw in his badge and went rogue seventeen years ago when his ‘historical and moral’ differences brought him into conflict with the ChronoGuard High Chamber. The downside of this was that he didn’t really exist at all in any accepted terms of the definition; the ChronoGuard had interrupted his conception in 1917 by a well-timed knock on his parents’ front door. But despite all this Dad was still around, and I and my brothers had been born. ‘Things,’ Dad used to say, ‘are a whole lot weirder than we can know.’

What I liked most: It is a tie between three elements/details/plot devices. In no particular order, the first one is the Kafka-like trial where Thursday is accused (and, of course, in a true Kafka manner, most of the time she has no idea of what she is actually accused of). The second is the part where Thursday’s father proposes her to take a vacation in a parallel world until her child is born, and that world is our very own (and I dearly regretted that Thursday didn’t accept the offer). And, last but not least, all the coincidences created by A. Hades were quite a nice touch too :)

What I liked least: Can I complain a tiny bit about how little was the present affected by major changes in the past? Not that I mind this one very much since the author explained that the timelines have a way of preserving themselves, but sometimes I did find it a bit difficult to believe that Thursday’s life was exactly the same with or without Landen (other than the place she lived in, of course). Count on me to complain about everything time-travel related that doesn’t change the future as I think it should :)

Recommend it to? Anyone who has read and liked the first book. While this one is my favorite of the two, I am not sure the atmosphere can be understood well enough without knowing the previous events.

This book is a sequel to:
The Eyre Affair

This book is followed by:
The Well of Lost Plots
Something Rotten

Also written by the author:
Shades of Grey

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Popularity: 13% [?]

I picked this up because I felt like some light reading and because Jane Austen being in the title sounded promising. Not to mention the time travel which I’m usually bound to enjoy. And yet it seems like I was expecting too much and so the story didn’t manage to draw me in all the way. At times, the plot seemed slapped together simply for the sake of being, with some matters that didn’t seem to have been considered all the way. For example, there were a few instances that very much detracted from my reading pleasure, such as when two characters get married, after a two year relationship, and on their wedding night they have a conversation like “You have to know I can’t cook. My mother died when I was young and etc.” — after two years together it’s hardly believable that the subject of cooking or abilities or one’s mother dying never came up before. Or the part at the end when every villain uncovers his/her dark & dirty secrets in a scene reminding me very strongly of a bad movie. The part of the plot where our male character is secretly hunting down spies was also quite unclear for me and to be honest the only thing I did get about it was that there was a secret place where the said spies exchanged notes. The number of the said spies went up and down quite mysteriously from my point of view, ’cause I mostly failed to see the reasoning. Let’s consider for example show spoiler

The fact that has disappointed me the most though is that there is not the slightest hint of depth to be found anywhere in the book! As I said, I was looking for something light, but unfortunately this was a bit too much. Take the characters for example. Eleanor is perfectly average, she is good at designing dresses, she dreams of studying Jane Austen, nothing interesting, nothing out of the ordinary. Despite that, there is a particular character who thinks the world of her, although there is no reason given for it other than the obvious “whenever I see you I dream of kissing you” part, with no background whatsoever. I for one would have liked a bit more interaction between the two, so the guy would have discovered the gal was special in a lot more ways than sheer physical attraction (but that’s usually my main qualm when it comes to romance books).

Speaking of the male lead, he is a cliche from head to toe: proud, rich, handsome, with a secret mission in order to help his country (**swoon**), irresistibly attracted by the heroine and so on. Not a bit of substance unfortunately, nothing to make him stand out in a crowd. The same goes for the rest of the cast, from the two flighty sisters acting a bit reckless (to the extent of visiting a gentleman in his bedroom at night, unthinkable at their ages and in that time), but quite likable overall, to Jane Austen herself, putting in a cameo appearance and speaking somewhat in cliches. Darn.

It may be time to say something nice about the book too. It does have some interesting moments (unfortunately nothing above average) and a cute ending (although it sort of annoyed me that the author never gave a moment’s thought of time travel affecting the future, other than the obvious — I mean that nothing actually changed, except what the author wanted to, but time travel doesn’t work like that :( ). Funny how the more I try to think of nice things to say the more things I didn’t like come to mind. I should probably stop now.

What I liked most: Probably not the best thing in the book but a nice touch. I was amused by Ellen, the cousin of the two ghost girls. Actually, not by her (since she never makes an appearance) but by the fact that the author has chosen to hint at her having premonitory dreams: she dreams that one of her cousins will break an arm, and it happens, she dreams that her ship will sink, and it presumably happens (since we don’t actually get to meet her), and so on. It’s cool in a way that such a minor character has a potentially interesting trait while no such thing happened to the major ones.

The idea of having a scene in a butterfly-filled meadow was quite cool too :)

What I liked least: The fact that Jane Austen is mentioned in the very title, thus heightening the potential readers expectations (yes, such as I). The book is a lot closer to a bodice-ripper than anything Austenesque, so the Jane Austen part is misleading to say the least.

Recommend it to? Chick lit & romance aficionados. Don’t worry, it’s probably not as bad as I made it sound, especially if you’re a fan of the genre. :)

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Popularity: 12% [?]

A book filled with “ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances” types. Yet I couldn’t not care about them, about all of them. Laura, a good girl that’s gone through so much as a child; Danny, the big bear with the huge heart; Thelma, considering her best asset her sense of humor and her face the biggest liability; Stefan, leaving his reckless youth behind and trying to atone for his misdoings. I rooted for them throughout the whole book, holding my breath at the key moments. From this point of view I’d say they’re wonderfully depicted characters, making a reader (me, me!) actually care for them and get involved in their lives.

The interesting thing is that, no matter how much I cared for the characters and wanted them to succeed and have a nice life, I sort of felt that the magnitude of their success sort of borders on the implausible. We have two kids raised in an orphanage: one becomes a terribly rich and appreciated writer (her first book was absolutely great and each of the next ones were better than the one before); the other becomes a famous movie star marrying a rich producer. I couldn’t help feeling that a bit less good fortune would have been a lot more statistically probable, so to speak.

I was amused to notice a similarity to the Terminator movies (although I think the book has probably been written first). Namely a man comes from another time, warns a woman that she and her son are in danger, and she starts training to become (and later becoming) a killing machine. Does that ring a bell? I think that the change is a bit more plausible in this book, having perhaps been triggered both by the loss of Danny as well as the threat for the future.

I have terribly loved everything time-travel paradox related, and the fact that the author has tried to put these paradoxes and their impossibility to the use of the characters. I may be wrong but I did see some mistakes though. Such as Chris’s theories when they were first followed by the unknown people. I didn’t think any of them as paradoxes at the moment, as Laura’s future could have been changed at any time. So what if they were already there, if someone had say killed Laura as a baby the whole pattern would have been changed, no paradox. We do find out later that Chris’s explanations were in fact correct, but only because Stefan’s past could not be changed (Stefan not Laura’s), a thing Chris couldn’t have known at the time being.
A smaller mistake I think was when Laura saw the lightning and figured why return as they already know where I am going to be. Wrong. They knew where she would have been had she not seen the lighting. But she did, and the pattern was free to change from now on. Not that any of the mistakes terribly bothered me as not only anything time travel requires some suspension of disbelief but can also be interpreted in more than one way, so who knows, looking at things from another perspective none of these may be mistakes after all (and I can always be wrong).

The coolest thing in the book (one that I had at first thought to be a grave mistake but after a while discovered it to be pure brilliance) was the return of Stefan in the lab eleven minutes after Kokoschka left it (also a really cool idea I don’t remember seeing anywhere else: anyone gone in a time travel mission was back after precisely eleven minutes, regardless of the amount of time spent there). But Kokoschka’s departure and Stefan’s subsequent arrival happened on March 16. On March 18 the last hit team was sent. And I thought, well, isn’t this messing with the team’s past, given that after Stefan did (killed everyone in the lab and arranged for the lab to be destroyed in two days’ time) sort of interfered with the team’s being sent? But later I realized there’s where the brilliance is: Stefan did kill everyone (luckily only five people were present) but erased all his traces and arranged for it to be seen as if those people have left the project and run away into the future by their own will. Meaning the lab continued to function only with a few people less. Also, the lab was going to be destroyed two days later (a number which bothered me at the time, as I felt it to be important but didn’t realize why) — which meant the hit team had time to be dispatched before the time was destroyed, thus their past being left unchanged. Yay.

What I liked most: Sir Tommy Toad (especially his three little clothing items).
************SPOILER***************
I was very impressed to discover the year where Stefan came from (one rarely sees books with people coming from the past to change their future :P)
Also, extra points for the idea of meeting with Churchill and that of sending a little note from the past to warn Laura. A great idea in the given situation.
***********END SPOILER************

What I liked least: I was very annoyed (and I mean really really annoyed) by the fact that both Laura and Thelma had (and complained about) headaches when hearing about time travel and paradoxes. It made them look really really dumb. I mean really, I do realize that, while time travel holds a special fascination for me and I love thinking about it, that may not be so for other people. But really, a headache? After that simple discussion? Bleh.

Recommend it? Definitely, a very captivating book.

Written by the same author:
The Husband
Life Expectancy
Odd Thomas
The Taking

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Popularity: 5% [?]

The first character I sort of cared about was Roger — finding him really annoying at first, then a riddle (is him good or bad?), and then, obviously, on the good side (not perfect, he still had his past, but very close to it and my favorite character in the whole novel). I would probably have felt the exact same for Lady Isolda, only the reader doesn’t get to actually know her really well, there are few scenes where we can see her (actually see her, or better said get to know her). On the whole there was precisely one scene (the one at the cabin with Lady Joanna) when we get to see how courageous Lady Isolda actually is, how smart, how defiant but also how loving towards the ones who deserve it. I would really have liked to get to know both Roger and Isolda a bit more. Actually, the same can be told of Magnus, he seemed like a very interesting guy, both smart and with a very easygoing attitude — I’m pretty certain I would have liked him a lot had I time enough (and scenes enough) to know him better. On the opposite side is Richard, the narrator, the guy that appears in each and every scene (well, he had to, being the narrator). For me he is only a portal to that other world, and not very interesting in himself. A really ordinary guy who remains ordinary even in his extraordinary situation (not that I blame him for that).

While the method the author has chosen for the character’s time travel (drinking a potion, thus activating the ancestors’ memories that were somehow kept in the cells) is not very original (but it might have been at the date the book was written :) ), I have liked the other ideas she had: the fact that the traveler in time remains physically where he is, the body making in real time the movements the body imagined in the past does, the fact that the time traveler is “connected” to a person living there, in the past (which really makes sense, that person must be the ancestor whose memories reached the time traveler’s cells), the fact that he can only travel in moments when his “receptor” is in the same place as him, the fact that he becomes really sick when he’s trying to intervene (probably because it would modify the memories already contained in hiss cells), etc.

What I liked most: The fact that the author has taken care to approach the language issue (Richard understands what everybody is saying because Roger understands what everybody is saying).

What I liked least: For starters, the name Bodrugan. Really really disliked it for some reason. I know he really existed and all (a great job from the author’s part) but I still dislike the name :D

And then, what’s up with the narrator’s connection to Roger seemingly ceasing to exist (or at least moving on to Robbie)? I know Robbie is Roger’s brother and as such bound to share genetic material with him, but still, if Roger was an ancestor there is a very slight chance that Robbie was also one. Plus, when Roger died the narrator says he experienced a feeling of peace and of closure — but why, since it seems that he was now attuned to Robbie?

Recommend it? Yes, it’s a captivating read.

Written by the same author:
Frenchman’s Creek

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Popularity: 3% [?]

Neither Jeff nor Pamela are remarkable in any way — on the contrary, they lived a pretty unremarkable life until the day they died. They’re just ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Their actions are very believable to the reader because of that – after all, what would any of us do if he/she had the occasion of relieving his/her life? Get rich? Save the world? Get really really stoned? Marry a nice girl/guy? Jeff has done all these and more. Each time knowing that whatever things he had accomplished (his fortune, his daughter, his marriage to Judy) would eventually fade away to nothingness (or, who knows, perhaps a parallel Universe?). Kind of a hard thing to swallow, isn’t it?

I must say I have found quite interesting the theory Stuart McCowan has come up with to explain their situation (I mean, the guy was clearly crazy but the idea was sort of cool in a sci-fi/Matrix kind of way): the whole Earth is a sort of simulation for the entertainment of aliens from Antares.

“Why do the extraterrestrials like violence here on earth so much?”
[...]
“None of them ever dies anymore,” Stuart went on impassionedly, “and they’ve lost the killing genes, so there’s no more war or murder where they come from. But the animal part of their brains still needs all that, at least vicariously. That’s where we come in.

“We’re their entertainment, like television or movies. And this segment of the twentieth century is the best part, the most randomly bloody time of them all, so they keep playing it again and again. But the only people who know all this are the performers, the ones on stage: the repeaters. Manson is one of us, I know; I can see it in his eyes, and the Antareans have told me. Lee Harvey Oswald, too, and Nelson Bennett that time he got to Kennedy first. Oh, there’s a lot of us now.”

Speaking of Nelson Bennett and Kennedy, that’s an interesting part of the story too (a part that I think the author had a bit of fun with). In his first replay Jeff tries to stop the assassination of Kennedy, so he sends a fake letter to the police, signed Lee Harvey Oswald, where he declares his intentions of murdering the then president. Sure enough Oswald is arrested and Jeff is happy he changed history to the better. Until the fateful day came and Kennedy was still assassinated, only this time by a previously unknown guy, one Nelson Bennett. Jeff thinks that the guys that have organized the assassination must have had a backup plan, and that this probably means he cannot actually influence the greater events of the future (although he later proves he can, by mistakenly telling the wrong things to the wrong person and, as a consequence, having Al-Quaddafi killed and all the history of the world completely changed) – my first thought though was that perhaps the author was trying to suggest that Lee Harvey was not the one who killed Kennedy but a mere prop.

Speaking of the replay that had Al-Quaddafi killed, that is perhaps one of my favorite ones — if not my very favorite of them all. I couldn’t quite put my finger on the reasons though, perhaps because it had started out with some very good intentions plus a brilliant idea (Jeff and Pamela needed help to figure out more details about the delays they experienced when starting each replay, so they decided they should make the scientists of the world work for them — how? by intriguing them with their unusual situation. How would they prove they are who they say they are — and save lots of lives in the process? Why, by publicly predicting some disasters, of course). Only some government organization gets interested in them and takes them into custody, forcing them (including via sodium pentothal and polygraph sessions) to make predictions about the future politics of various countries — then acting in consequence, such as killing Al-Quaddafi when they found out he will appoint himself premier in Lybia at a later date. The result? In about ten years time lots and lots of people were killed due to the changes made in the historical timeline, all weighing on Jeff and Pamela’s conscience (not to mention they got nothing they originally wanted, they got no scientists’ help and people were no longer warned of disasters).

What I liked most: The feeling of loss. Better said, the idea of the feeling of loss. The idea that even if one’s life could be lived all over and he/she would make the most altruistic choices (Pamela once was a children doctor) or the wrongest ones (see the above example), it will all turn to nothingness in a few years. Well, I don’t like the idea in itself, but the powerful frustration it invokes. All these lives, all these years, all these efforts, all these accomplishments – and nothing, absolutely nothing left. A though in itself that makes the idea of “replaying” one’s life quite unappealing to say the least.
(Although if you think about it there is one thing you always take with you, even when replaying – that is your mind, your capacities, your talents. Which means the replaying would probably be interesting for a person dedicating his lives to intellectually enriching his persona rather than building anything in the physical plane. Although all that knowledge with no one to share it wouldn’t be a thing to look forward to either)

What I liked least: I don’t know if that should be an actual issue (well, it hasn’t bothered me that much actually) but I was sorry that the author did not gave an explanation as of why everything had happened. Was it a random phenomenon or did it have an actual meaning? (such as, I don’t know, the hero and the heroine to learn some important things or just to find each other — I mean, they did learn to appreciate every moment of their time but did they actually need to live hundreds of years to realize that? :P )

Recommend it? Yes :) I wasn’t very taken with it at first but after a while I’ve grown really interested in it.

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