Showing posts with label time-travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label time-travel. Show all posts

Friday, April 26, 2013

Ripped by Shelly Dickson Carr






Title: Ripped
Author: Shelly Dickson Carr
Publisher: New Book Partners
Rating: worthy with reservations!


DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, this review is shorter so as not to rob the writer of their story, but even so, it will probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!

I started out liking this although the Cockney nonsense is way overdone. Yeah, Whitechapel is within a mile or so of St Mary Le Bow - the church within the earshot of which you have to be born to be a true Cockney, but let's not run away with ourselves, shall we?! Cockney hasn't always meant what it means today. FYI, St Mary's was designed by Sir Christopher Wren, who also designed St Paul's. The chapter titles of the book are based on Oranges and Lemons, an old nursery rhyme the words of which seem to be tied to the sound the various bells supposedly made. But with sixty chapters, there's an insufficiency of verses in that ditty to title them all so the author has to make up a few weird ones to fill the gaps.

The first interesting thing about this novel is that it's purportedly written by Shelly Dickson Carr, but it's copyrighted to Michelle Karol. There's no explanation for this that I can find in the ebook, and there's no information about Carr or Karol on wikipedia. I can only conclude that the author is trying to siphen off some publicity value from her renowned grandfather, John Dickson Carr whose novel The house at Satan's Elbow I reviewed back in July 2013.

My first problem with it arose with the instadore Toby character who was your typically profoundly boring he-teen and the masturbators of the universe type. Seriously, can we not get away from this tedious rubber-stamp male love interest? Apparently not. It would be nice if he turned out to be the villain, but it never looked like that was going to happen. I find it abhorrent that women - especially modern independent women like Katie - are constantly attracted in these novels to men who treat them like dirt of which calling her 'pet' and 'lass' are the least of his infractions. This is an appalling message to send to young women.

Anyway, the novel begins with Katie, an American teen living in London with her grandmother. Her sister is Courtney (as in Courtney Love, but not really) who is in a punk band which is apparently very successful, but this sister can’t be bothered to call her sister, and she plays no part in the story. Katie and Courtney's parents are conveniently dead - a major trope for YA novels. While Katie is getting ready to visit Madame Tussauds waxworks (yes, bad grammar, but that's the way it is!) with Collin (yes with two L's), a cousin, she notices how much the portrait (which her grandmother has conveniently dug out of storage and placed in her room) looks like Courtney. Note that Katie is a history buff - yeah, we get it, time-travel, history buff, going to see the waxworks exhibit of Jack the Ripper, etc etc. Let’s get on with the story instead of reading the Daily Telegraph, shall we?! So off they go to Tussauds where they meet Collin's friend Toby, of course, with his dark eyes, cleft chin, unruly hair, and devilish manner.

Aforementioned issues aside, the story is reasonably well written, and very readable. As long as it didn’t insist upon straying over the line, I could see myself enjoying it, but it all depended on how strong that line was and how good Shelly Dickson Carr/Michelle Karol was at coloring inside it, which promised to be problematical given that Toby inappropriately kept grabbing at Katie as they entered the chamber of horrors, as though she was a worthless weak slip of a girl who needed to be manhandled or she would wilt away and die like a plucked flower. That Katie reacted so limply to his inappropriate behavior gave me little hope that she would turn out to be a decent female protagonist.

I have to say that Madame Tussauds has improved dramatically since I went through it if it’s anything like Karol/Carr describes (although I doubt it actually is anything like Karol/Carr describes!). I was disappointed in the sad, tired, and dusty exhibits, but Karol/Carr has the exhibit featuring lasers and holograms, and narrated by animatronics figures. It's been a long time since I was there, so maybe it improved.

Carr also goes well past the accepted victims of the Ripper (which numbered five), adding three fictional ones. Molly Potter was never a victim: it was Elizabeth Stride who was part of the double murder along with Catherine Eddowes. And no, Eddowes was neither buxom nor a singer by profession, although she did sing to herself apparently, but I prefer George Carlin's version of the 'Tara-raboom-de-eh' (Tara-raboom-de-eh, did you get yours today? I got mine yesterday, that's why I walk this way...!), so Carr was evidently planning on having Katie change history. There are those who argue that Stride was not a Ripper victim, and others who argue that she was, but that the Ripper was interrupted before he could carry out his grisly obsession in full, and that's why Catherine Eddowes was murdered just an hour later. The Ripper's blood lust had not been slaked. The actual last victim was Mary Jane Kelly - and no, she didn’t look like Marilyn Monroe or Anna Nicole Smith, not even close, but Carr has the last victim as Lady Beatrix Twyford, who happens to be the same woman who was in the portrait back in Katie's room at her grandmother's! So yes, an interesting twist, if that's what it is. It reminds me of my own Timeless in some regards.

So there's this exhibit called The London Stone which is fictional (The London Stone actually resides in Cannon Street, but it was once a part of St Swithun's church). The stone has magical powers according to Carr, and of course when Katie touches it, determined to save her distant relative's life, she's transported back to 1888 London, where Collin and Toby also conveniently exist, but their Victorian versions! That was a little too convenient for me, but I decided to give her some rope and see if could anchor this ship or hang herself with it!

So Katie ends up in the Duke's house and Katie overhears him arguing with his granddaughter Lady Beatrix's intended fiancé - except that the Duke of nuke 'em, doesn't intend any such pairing to take place. So conveniently for the plot, he makes a deal with Major Brown that if he gets himself elevated significantly in rank at Scotland Yard, then the cantankerous Duke will give his consent to their marriage, otherwise he leaves Beatrix alone. And of course, Lady Beatrix is indeed the woman in the portrait in Katie’s room.

Katie goes to a play (Jekyll & Hyde) at the Lyceum theater, which happens to be managed by Bram Stoker, who is married to a prior love interest of Oscar Wilde, with whom they travel to the theater. This sounds far fetched, but it is in fact true! Whether Wilde went to see Jekyll & Hyde at the theater I can't say, but he was a friend of Stoker, contrary to the inaccurate and inappropriate way the relationship is portrayed n the novel. Indeed, Stoker visited Wilde in France after his self-imposed exile subsequent to the imprisonment which effectively shattered Wilde and robbed us of his talent.

Also at the theater is actress Lily Langtree, and the Prince of Wales is in attendance as well, but this was after their affair, so there was nothing untoward going on there. However, since Langtree was in the USA in August 1888, it would have been just a bit difficult for her to have been at the Lyceum that night! I have no explanation for why Carr felt such an interfering need to drag historical characters around like this and for no reason at all: none of this contributed to the novel. On the contrary - it distracted from it. James Whistler, for example, became very happily married in 1888, so it's highly unlikely that he'd be hanging out in cheap and nasty London pubs and be haring around London with Oscar Wilde, with whom he'd had an increasing rift since the mid-1880's.

There's also a major (I use that term advisedly!) red herring afloat in trying to implicate Gideon Brown, Beatrix's fiancé, as the Ripper. This is tied to missing opera glasses, the absence of which is completely done to death to the point of being really annoying. I don't know if this is a ham-fisted attempt to implicate him and mislead us, or a ham-fisted attempt to point to the true killer. Brown's motive might have been to generate a series of high profile crimes which he will solve and thereby garner a much-needed promotion for himself, but if that was the case, he failed, because the Ripper's crimes were never solved! I don't buy Brown as the Ripper. I might buy the Duke as such, perhaps not directly, but indirectly, in a desperate attempt to thwart (yes, thwart, I said it!) Brown's ambition for his granddaughter's hand, but even that is weak.

The opera glasses are of interest only for the fact that a set were found by the body of the Ripper's first victim (in this fiction, not irl). That victim was indeed Mary Ann Nichols. The opera glasses were quickly purloined by this guy Cross (whose first name is changed in this novel for reasons as unexplained as they are unnecessary). Carr demonstrates an apparently whimsical bent for altering the details of the Ripper murders and for no reason at all that I can discern. By all means play with history if it benefits your fiction, but random change without any purpose is merely annoying to me. She apologizes for this in an end note title "Notes to the curious" but nowhere in that does she offer a rational accounting of the myriad and gratuitous changes in details, which she misleadingly describes as "changed slightly" and a "bit of factual tinkering". No, they were not! They were changed wholesale, manufactured out of nothing and for no reason. I was set to give this novel a somewhat disapproving 'worthy' once I saw the loose ends being tied off at the end and figured that other readers might take to it a lot more readily than I did, but after reading the notpology "note" I was so annoyed by it that I really wanted to renege on that agreement with myself; however, I shall hold to my promise.

So naturally we wonder about the perp in this story, and there are several possible candidates. I discount Brown, as I've mentioned. There's also something not quite right with the Reverend Pinker who is with the theater party, and while I would like it to be him, I excluded him, too. I still can find no explanation for his meandering through this tale; it would have remained almost exactly the same story had his character been entirely absent from it.

I've also considered that Lady Beatrix herself - a character who is hardly in this story at all - is a potential Ripper, but after all this, my suspicions fell heavily on Collin right from the start. Of course, as you all know if you read my reviews, my guesses are typically worthless! So were they in the case? You'll have to read the story to find out. Perhaps I'm supposed to mistakenly think it's Collin; Carr is dropping endless, really clunky blaring announcements that it's him, while having Collin point an accusing finger at Brown. This ought to make me think it isn't Collin. OTOH, perhaps Carr is being so brazen with the clues because she wants us to think she wouldn't drop these massively telegraphic "hints" if it actually was him! Who knows - maybe it's Toby and he's implicating Collin out of resentment that he has to spend so much of his life keeping him out of trouble?

There are some serious errors over Mary Ann Nichols. She was not in her early twenties as Carr claims, but in her early forties and rather grey-haired! That's hardly a slight change, and the reason for it, which we learn of later, isn't exactly a plot killer. But even if we allow this first one to slide, where is the logic for changing any of the others? Contrary to their popular portrayal, the Ripper victims were not the young innocent women they're all too often misrepresented as in such stories. With the sole exception of the Ripper's last Canonical victim, Mary Jane Kelly who actually was in her mid 20's, all of the victims were in their forties. These poor women were old before their time, and were worn and rather rough people, down on their circumstances and leading sad lives as casual prostitutes. This doesn't, of course, mean they merited death, nor does it mean they merited ill-treatment of any kind, so let's not disrespect them by mis-portraying them.

But the real problem with Carr's story here is that Nichols was killed at about 2:30 am, so there's no way in hell she could have died while Katie and her party were at the theater! And on the topic of 'whilst' vs 'while' - it's highly unlikely that a lower class seller of peanuts in the theater would say 'whilst' as opposed to 'while'! But we writers sometimes have a hard time not writing 'whilst' don't we? I torment myself over it often! Anyway, the theater trip was a mess, and it was glossed over in some respects, so we cannot tell who was in their seat and when. Also it was a long way from where Mary Nichols died, so it wasn't like someone could have slipped out, killed her and slipped back in very conveniently. Does this mean that no one at the theatre did it? The only one absent was Brown, who arrived very late and was the last one in possession of those opera glasses....

Other than the absurd obsession with those damned opera glasses, what bothered me most was about the theater was that Katie sat next to Oscar Wilde during the performance, was talking with him often, but never once thought to try and warn him to beware of the Marquess of Queensberry!

On the topic of language, Carr does a pretty decent job, but she comes off the rails once or twice as I discuss here. Worse than this, however, is the Cockney. It grated on my nerves with every obsessive-compulsive use of it, and it's way, way, w-a-y overdone. On language in general, a Brit would never say 'spigot' for faucet, for example, as she has present-day Toby do. They wouldn't say 'faucet', either; it's 'tap'. And I've never encountered an example of anyone of the upper classes refer to a friend as 'old sod'! I have no idea where she dug that one up. Neither would the old Duke say 'insure' in place of 'ensure'.

The common Cockney for suit is 'whistle' as in 'whistle and flute', not 'bag of fruit' That latter one might be allowable, but I've never heard it used! Later she has Toby use the term 'Scapa Flow' rhyming with 'go', but this usage would never have occurred in 1888 since 'Scapa Flow' refers to a British naval base not used before 1919, so Toby would not have known it. It has nothing to do with the term 'scarper' which does mean to beat a hasty retreat and is much more the kind of term Toby would have realistically used.

Carr also has the 1888 boys use the term 'rum and coke' rhyming with 'joke', but this term was not in use either, since Coca Cola had not been invented! Its precursor was only invented in 1886, and the Coca-Cola Company wasn't even incorporated until early 1888, so it was very highly unlikely that it would have crossed the Atlantic and been in sufficiently popular usage as a drink to be appropriated by the Cockney tongue in only five months. Carr tries to get around this by having them claim that 'coke' refers to a form of coal, but this excuse isn't even worthy of respect. It makes no sense whatsoever to talk about rum and coal!

She also has Collin use the phrase "That's not bleedin' funny", but I seriously doubt that the well-bred son of a Duke would drop letters or use the word 'bleeding'. Toby, yes, but not Collin; it simply didn't strike me as realistic. She has us believe that the Duke would issue Collin with a pocket knife for use in fights. This, again, didn't have any veracity in it for me at all. I keep trying to like this story, and it would be easy to do so in general terms, if the suspension of my disbelief wasn't let crash to the floor so frequently!

Anyway, having failed (for that matter, not even tried!) to save Mary Nichols, Katie unaccountably goes to her inquest. I can see no reason for this, especially since the bulk of the 'inquest' is completely fictional. Carr has Mary Ann's father, for example, show up, and she names him Jeffrey Nichols! It's 'Geoffrey' which is the English version of this name and which would most likely have been in use in that era, but all of that part of this novel is complete nonsense! Mary Ann's father was actually Edward Walker. I have no idea why Carr has completely fictionalized this.

Before Katie turns up at the inquest, she's forced by circumstances to share her secret with Toby and the increasingly obnoxious Collin, but instead of telling them that she'a a time-traveler, she claims she's clairvoyant. After passing a test set by the skeptical - or is it sceptical?! - Toby (who isn't quite skeptical enough!) she wins them over to her side in her attempt to stop Jack the Ripper, and this puts a fly in my Collin-is-the-Ripper ointment, because on a trip back to the future, Katie learns something. She also learns that future Toby has time-traveled and that she can only make one more trip: three's the charm evidently for time travel using the London Stone.

I must say that Carr has her menu rather heavily larded with herring regarding Collin's implication in the murders at this point, but whether they're red or not remains to be seen. The fly in the ointment regards Collin's short lifespan. Note that when Katie attends the inquest, Collin has less than a week to live - according to a glance at her family Bible back in the future which, of course, records births, deaths and marriages. In that Bible, Katie discovers the the Collin from the past died on September 9th, which means he couldn't have murdered Mary Kelly on November 9th.

However, since Katie returns to the past resolving to save Collin from his premature death, perhaps in rescuing him, she condemns Mary Kelly to die? The problem with the family Bible in this context, is that this is a rather peculiarly (although not exclusively) American thing, not really a British thing. Though Bibles were used for such records in England in the Victorian era, the tradition died; however, lets assume that this particular Bible may have been used in Victorian times and then simply kept in storage without the tradition continuing. See - I can compromise!

I have to say I think Katie's assessment at the inquest (prompted by the smell!) that people only washed once per week seems overly generous of her! There was a phrase in England 'Ne'er cast a clout 'til May be out' which means no-one takes off their winter clothing until the weather warms up. They live work and sleep in their one winter outfit, and perhaps take a bath in the spring, so bathing even once per week is stretching it IMO! The problem is that none of us lived back then, and we have little to go on as to the daily lives of your everyday working classes which I find really sad. So once/week it is!

But if I allow that, then I have to say "No! Shelly Carr, it's libelous to tell your readers that people were still jailed for witchcraft in the Victorian era in Britain, even if those words leave the mouth of one of your characters!" That accusation isn't true at all. The last trial for witchcraft in Britain was in 1712, and that woman was reprieved. Such superstition! That doesn't mean people didn't believe in such absurdities, but it's not illegal to believe crazy things. Not even in Britain. And let's contrast that with the USA, shall we? The Salem witch trials took place in 1878, just a decade before the Ripper era, and we all know how evil those were!

Carr also gives us misinformation about "Long Liz" Stride, one of the five Canonical Ripper victims, but one who may not actually have been killed by him (or her!). Katie conveniently happens to run into Liz in a pawn shop where she, Toby, and the obnoxious Collin are attempting to buy back the opera glasses which Cross has pawned. Stride is pawning her wedding ring which is dated 1881 (the year of the famous gunfight at the OK corral!), but Stride actually married in 1869, and her husband didn't disappear, as is implied in this novel. The two of them simply broke up, and Stride had no children. The dock worker she lived with (not married to) was named Michael, not Alfred. Why Carr has changed all of this remains at mystery.

Toby, in an attempt to find the truth from Katie about how she knows what she knows, takes her, in a Matrix-moment(!) to the 'Oracle' at the Tower of London (about which there's a rather large and unnecessary info-dump which I skipped), but the Oracle cannot see or hear Katie. Yes, the Oracle is blind, but she can't see her psychically! It's like she doesn't exist. This spooks Toby, so he takes her onto a London Underground train - at that time hauled by steam engines, where the carriages supposedly fill with noxious fumes. I can't buy that. Yes, I can buy that it smelled down there and was less than the most pleasant experience, but not that it was the gas chamber which Carr portrays. But Katie gives in and 'fesses up to Toby that she's a time-traveler.

So off Toby and Collin go to warn "Dark Annie" Chapman that she's made the cut next on the Ripper's hit parade. Why they do this is a complete mystery, Why not simply follow Annie around on the night the Ripper gets her and apprehend him there and then, before he can kill her?! Again Carr gives misleading information about Chapman. Carr describes her as tall when she was actually the shortest of all the victims, at only five feet. And Carr claims that in age, she looked thirty but could have been anywhere between twenty and forty, when she was in fact the oldest victim at almost fifty. Carr gives her black hair when it was actually dark brown, and has her married to a military man when she had never married any such person and was living with a sieve maker when she was murdered. Again, why change these facts? It makes no sense, adds nothing whatsoever to the story, and is just plan annoying, to say nothing of outright insulting to these murder victims. What does Carr hope to gain by this behavior, other than alienating an intelligent, thinking readership?

Annie Chapman is murdered as is "Georgie" Cross. Both Toby and Katie now are convinced, because of the circumstances, that Brown did it, but the fact remains that Collin had the opportunity to kill both of them. Toby was there at the time and failed to prevent it. Katie and Toby tell the Duke what happened and that they believe it was Brown, and the Duke believes them. He's now convinced that Brown is setting up Collin in order to use his implication in the Ripper murders to blackmail the Duke into consenting to his suit for Beatrix.

I have to say that the further this story is drifting from what actually happened. the less I'm enjoying it. It's like reading historical fiction about Martin Luther King and finding that he's white, or reading that Oscar Wilde was a little wuss who couldn't defend himself...oh, wait a minute, Carr actually did imply that! I'm anxious to see how this pans out if only to learn whether Carr actually can account for the disturbing number of stretchers she's employed, because I find it hard to believe that a writer would take this many liberties without having a good reason for it. Will this confusion of victims pan out? What will actually happen to Dora Fowler, for example - who absurdly turns up at Annie Chapman's house (which is where Carr has Chapman killed) after the murder? Must we suspect Dora as the Ripper now?!

After an absurd chase around London's Whitechapel district, Katie runs into Dora and they both start climbing the skeleton of Tower Bridge, which was two years into an eight-year build at that time. The ostensible reason for this is that Toby and Collin are up there, but we're offered no good reason at all as to why they are up there, so all we can conclude is that Carr is taking a page out of the 2009 Sherlock Holmes movie and having her finale on the structure.

The problem with this scheme is that the superstructure couldn't have been started until the two deep anchor pilings were in place and those had to be excavated and filled with 70,000 tons of concrete before the twin towers could be built on them. The towers themselves were only half finished in 1892, so there would have been precious little to scale four years earlier in 1888, as this drawing confirms!

Once again, Le Stupide prevails as Katie abandons Dora on the scaffolding, and continues alone to try and reach Collin and Toby up top (which of course didn't exist in 1888). Note that this is the girl who came back to the past with the express intention of thwarting Jack the Ripper, leaving one of his known victims (known to Katie, not known in reality) defenseless as she climbs up in a brain-dead effort to find Toby and Collin. When she gets up there, she finds both of them: Toby unconscious, and Collin fighting Major Brown. At this point we know one fact for certain: We know that Brown is going to fall into the river and be presumed dead, but that he will actually not be dead, and sure enough, that's what happens (at least the first part). Oh, and the Reverend Pinker is also in the area. What? Yes, you heard me. Let's lard-up this already convoluted "plot" with yet another red herring. Pinker is not only pink in name but also in hue, so red herring is particularly appropriate in his case.

I'll finish this up here, since I've gone into way more detail than I intended. Hopefully it will be more than enough for you to judge for yourself, because you're going to have to make your own choice about this (as I hope you always do!). Yes, Ripped intrigued me, but in the end it just didn't get my bunny hopping. It wasn't that the story itself was so bad, but there were too many inexplicables for me - where I was left asking "what?". I don't like stories like that, but maybe you will like this one. Maybe this one for someone who knows a lot less about the Ripper murders than I do - but then that was the sole reason I opted to read it in the first place!

And no, I don't know who did it! No one does; that's why the true events are so fascinating for writers. You can make up your own explanation, as indeed I did in the Manuscript Found in a Lead Casket short story which is contained in the Poem y Granite collection.


Monday, April 22, 2013

Doctor Who: Prisoners of Time by by Scott & David Tipton, Art by Simon Fraser, Color by Gary Caldwell






COMIC BOOK REVIEW!

Title: Doctor Who: Prisoners of Time
Author: Scott & David Tipton
Art: Simon Fraser
Color: Gary Caldwell
Publisher: IDW Publishing
Rating: WORTHY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley, and is available now.

I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review.


This is an excellent comic about Doctor Who in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary this year, which the current season on TV is somehow failing to get into. Hopefully this will change in the second half of the season, as we approach closer to the month and date of the anniversary. The comic I had a chance to read is divided into three chapters of 22 pages each, one chapter for each of the very first three doctors, portrayed on TV by William Hartnell (died 1975), Patrick Troughton (died 1987), and Jon Pertwee (died 1996). Even Richard Hurndall, who stood in for Hartnell in 1983's The Five Doctors is no longer with us.

That, I'm afraid, is a huge problem for TV. Once a series is half a century old, it’s inevitable that many of the original actors have died, or grown so old that they cannot reasonably portray the characters we remember so fondly, but this is no problem for this comic book. We can once again enjoy the people we loved and grew up with as fresh and vital as they ever were, and in new adventures!

The artwork in this comic is standard comic book art, but the renditions of the Doctors are remarkably reminiscent of the actors who played them, even down to facial expressions and dialog. Clearly this comic was done by people who know and love the show as well as I do - if not better. Chapter one, for example, was very much William Hartnell, and I'd actually forgotten how he kept misstating Ian Chesterton's name! But here he is back to life, spouting his exasperated and dramatic catch-phrases! It was nice to see a strong scientific element get some mention in the story, too (they hang out with Thomas Huxley in 1868), but I wasn't quite as impressed by the drawing of his companions. They're still better than anything I could manage, I freely admit, but not quite as captivating as the Doctor himself was.

This chapter takes place after his granddaughter, Susan has left the TARDIS and has been replaced by Vicki, who joins Barbara Wright (played on TV by Jacqueline Hill, sadly also no longer with us) and Ian (played on TV by William Russell). They face the Zarbi, a race of ant-like beings the size of Great Danes, which are harmless unless taken over by an evilly-inclined controlling agency as they are here, by an octopus-like creature called The Animus and invading the London underground. On TV, we first met these creatures in season 2, ep 5 of the classic Doctor Who series back in the sixties, in The Web Planet. The Zarbi are freed when Ian runs over The Animus with one of the trains! Unfortunately, right then, all three of the Doc's companions disappear!

In Chapter 2, we find ourselves with Patrick Troughton's portrayal of The Doc, traveling with Zöe and the feisty, kilt-wearing Jamie McCrimmond, a highlander from the mid-eighteenth century, both of which are drawn much better than the first doctor's companions. Jaime was played on TV by Fraser Hines, and he appeared in more episodes of Doctor Who than any other companion - and more episodes than most of the doctors for that matter! The three of them materialize in a store which specializes in selling police boxes! They have models in all shapes, sizes, and colors, so The Doc's TARDIS fits right in. When they step out of the store, they're in a mall, which happens to be one of the greatest trading posts in the galaxy, but it’s also a haven of black-market activity. I loved the one frame where The Doc is standing outside a hat store and there's a fez in the window, and then the next frame is a close up of The Doc angled so that it looks like he's actually wearing the fez! lol!

Some of this activity is slave-trading, and The Doc decides he's going to put an end to that! They follow the alien traders, who look rather like alligators, back to their store, where one of them takes an interest in Jamie, observing that he's from the past and therefore valuable. As the three time travelers meander into a bicycle shop (where one bicycle looks remarkably like the bikes from the TV series The Prisoner!), Jamie is kidnapped by the aliens and disappears. Fortunately, the Doc, in true second doctor fashion, has anticipated this, and has put a tracking device on him! He and Zöe trail him to an auction house, where slaves are being auctioned off to the highest bidder. The Doc's tracker leads them straight to Jamie, where they find many slaves in holding pens. They free all of them, but once again, right as their adventure reaches a successful conclusion, The Doc's companions disappear. Where the heck are they going? Who is taking them? Well, I guess we know it's not Who!

Chapter three is the third incarnation of the Doctor. He's hanging out with his usual companions, Sarah Jane Smith (played on TV by Elisabeth Sladen) and Liz Shaw (played on TV by Caroline John). Both of these actors are sadly no longer with us. The problem for this doctor is Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart's erratic behavior. Stewart was played on TV by Nicholas Courtney, now also deceased. Courtney had to be one of the few people in Doctor Who who had actually fulfilled in real life the role he played on screen, in that he actually was in the British army for a while! The Doc discovers that Lethbridge-Stewart is being controlled by the Remorax, by means of a small fish-like creature in his throat. Once that's removed, he returns to his usual self, but he, along with The Doc's other two companions is abducted by a strange man in a hooded costume. So now we have an idea of who's behind it, but we still know nothing of exactly who this person is, or why he's doing this.

And that's all we get! I hate this! Now I'll go insane trying to figure out what happens next until I can get my hands on volume two of this series! But what a joy to see a series celebrate the Doctor's companions? I can hardly wait for volume 2.

If you're neither a fan of Doctor Who, nor a fan of comic books, then this is probably not for you, but if you're even mildly into either of them, I recommend this series based on this opening salvo. It’s fun, it’s well done, it’s a wonderful trip down the Doctor Who memory lane. I don’t know if this will ever become a collector's item, but it's about time(!) someone did something for the 50th anniversary, and I'm glad it was this! I'm definitely going to be looking for these coming on sale. Not for myself, of course, but for my kids...Ahem!


Saturday, April 6, 2013

Vortex by Julie Cross






Title: Vortex
Author: Julie Cross
Publisher: Thomas Dunne
Rating: WARTY!

This is the sequel to Tempest reviewed elsewhere in this blog, and of which I developed mixed feelings, but not enough to put me off trying the second volume. Unfortunately, I ran into trouble right from the off! Tragically, there is a prologue, but Cross is sneaky: she labeled the first page as prologue and then on the next page went to a different type-face and started labeling what looked like chapters with time and date, so after I skimmed several pages, I mistakenly concluded that this was where the story began! I was tricked into reading prologue! Very sneaky.

Unfortunately for her ruse, she changed typeface again to this really nasty faux free-hand face which I refused to read because it was too much work. Novels are relaxation and entertainment, not work; I refuse to work for my entertainment and it certainly isn't relaxing to be so Vexed. yes, I said it: vexed! Cross make me cross!

I found chapter one hidden away some thirty pages in! What's up with that?! Cool trick though - she got me! When I actually started reading chapter one, I found it a bit hard to get into. It was Jackson and his "partner" Kendrick (yet Jackson is convinced he's alone and he's still having flashbacks to Holly!) training for the Tempest organization, and the training seemed pointless to me. Why would he need to be dropped onto a mountainside? When is that ever going to happen in the normal course of his activities?!

So when he and Kendrick get down to the HQ, we have to wonder why this HQ is in the foothills of the Alps! We were expressly told that their training was going to be in the Middle East in the previous novel, so their unexplained change in location is confusing at best, but it isn't as big of a mystery as is why they put their operatives at risk of being slaughtered by having them impersonate members of the EoT (Enemas of Time) to attack Jackson and Kendrick. Fortunately, their lives were saved by the fact that Jackson and Kendrick are completely incompetent!

So let's move right along, then, shall we? They're tortured in an interrogation room by their own people, but later they find out it wasn't really torture. So that's okay then, isn't it? Jackson and Kendrick failed their torture - I'm not kidding! - so they're punished for failing their torture(!) by being given an assignment to subject their partner to their worst fear! This is designed to inculcate trust! Jackson's torture is to kiss a hot babe: Jenni Stewart, whom he hates presumably because she helped him in the first novel. He successfully kisses her and she likes it, but then the red warning lights start flashing all over the HQ because there is a death threat to the German chancellor.

Naturally, the Germans, being completely and utterly incompetent and useless, have to have the Tempest team rescue their own chancellor, so the team (that is to say, four trainee operatives and two supervisors because we know for a fact that seasoned operatives are non-existent in Tempest for reasons which can never be explained to us readers.) sneak into Germany uninvited and unannounced.

With guns drawn, they encounter some EoTs, but not a single one of the Tempest team shoots a single one of the EoTs, so they pretty much all get away to cause havoc elsewhere and else when. The Tempest team discovers a bomb, but it's so futuristic that they cannot defuse it. Apparently the bomb is so futuristic that it can't be disguised to look like something other than a bomb, either, thereby making it really easy to spot. It also has a weird side-effect: it makes people stupid. It makes them so stupid that not a single one of them is smart enough to think of Jackson taking it and jumping to the middle of the ocean, let it go, and jump back!

But don't worry - there's a handy eleven year old redhead nearby who defuses the bomb. Yes, it's Emily. She couldn't apparently be bothered to tell Jackson, the first time that she saw him, that he need not show up to this bomb threat because she would defuse it, and clearly there was absolutely no need to tell him that if he did come, he should come in numbers, packing weapons because there would be eight EoTs, and why on Earth, at this point, would she bother to give him even so much as the slightest hint of what's happening, so he knows what to do and what not to do?

This sequel is becoming harder and harder to like, not least of which is because there are small parts that I do like, and reading them I feel good about it again, but then (almost inevitably it seems) the good part is rudely interrupted by another attack of Le Stupide . Nevertheless, I will try to press on and hope against hope that the good will outweigh the bad - or at least the bad will be explained so it doesn't seem so bad - as I progress further.

Well now I'm about half-way through this and Cross has done it again: she's made it interesting, but that's leavened with some confusion! They go to NYC for an assignment, and Senator Healy seems a bit creepy to me and knows far to much about Tempest and time travel. Healy wanted Jackson, for reasons unexplained, to pal up with Jenni Stewart, and he tries one night with her, but chickens out of going all the way even though she wants him to.

It's Healy's function they're to attend, and of course, Holly is there. This makes twice since he's been in NYC that Jackson has run into Holly, who is with a quarterback for a boyfriend. Knowing that her safety depends on his avoiding her like the plague, Jackson of course, pals up with her on both occasions. I'm forced to the only conclusion left to me: that Jackson is a jerk who has no regard for Holly's well-being at all. He's a selfish prick, and that's all there is to him.

At the function, all of the Tempest people in attendance behave like idiots and respond to an alert which has demanded that they all congregate in one location where they can conveniently be blown up. Fortunately, it's the same bomb which Jackson saw Emily defuse, so he naturally is the expert on defusing it. Then Cassidy, who he thinks is his mom for reasons unknown (I guess I missed that part - or glazed-eyed my way over it) grabs him and jumps him despite the fact that he and all the other operatives have taken anti-time jump medication. How that works is a mystery but by far the bigger mystery is why no one seems to think that the total failure of the anti-time jump medication is any big deal, much less something which is reportable. For that matter, how come there isn't a mass transplanting of this one time-jump gene so they can have as many time-jumpers as the EoT has?

But Jackson exhibits a new skill here - he derails Cassidy's time-jump and jumps her to a location of his own, which does her some serious damage, but not enough to prevent her jumping away again. So once again we have multiple EoT agents, and not a single one of them is killed by the Tempest crew. They they whine about there being so many enemy agents. Well DUHH! Frankly, at this point, I find myself wishing this novel had been about the EoT instead of Tempest. That novel sounds much more engrossing. Oh, and BTW, there is yet another evil organization which is different from Tempest and from EoT, but I forget the name. I'll post it later.

So now Jackson is in the apartment where his other mom lives, Eileen, who is Kevin's (his dad's) girlfriend, with a two year old Jackson and Courtney. He tries to talk her into coming with him (and the hell with the two two-year olds!) but fortunately, she's actually responsible and refuses to leave them. There is, at this point, no explanation as to why no one has time-jumped back to the castle to when the bomb was planted so they could take out the bomber nor why no one has time-jumped back to the Senator's function to when the bomb was planted so they could take out the bombers. Every single thing Tempest is doing is completely reactive; not a one of them even thinks about taking proactive action to derail these bomb plots and take out the enemy agents.

So why am I still reading this? I still have mixed feelings about it: there are parts of it which are genuinely interesting and engrossing, and these are still common enough that I'm inclined to go along with it - especially since I'm half-way through it; then no one can say I didn't give the series a fair trial. But I have to admit that it's not very easy when there is so much stuff that makes me cringe, or worse, that makes no sense even within the story's own framework.

The story continues, yet again multiple EoTs show up; yet again not a single one is killed by Tempest even though several Tempest agents have good reason to want them dead and have guns drawn. Mason, a Tempest agent is killed because he's stupid and because the Tempest agents are nothing but wimps and wusses. Stewart reacts badly to Mason's death, which somehow causes her to find out about Holly, so Jackson tells her everything and then tells Kendrick everything. He runs into Holly casing his apartment. Now she's an agent! Seriously? Despite the fact that before going into his apartment and finding Holly, he 911's Kendrick and Stewart, neither one of them shows up! How useless is this organization?! Totally inept!

Holly thinks Jackson killed Adam. Despite his not doing so, he never denies it! Later, she leads this numb-nuts directly into a trap where she puts her second hand - not her other hand, but her second hand on her gun! How many hands does Holly have and how cool would she be on a date?! As they leave the tiny room under the subway, they step out onto the tracks, say a sentence or two and are instantly outside the subway without even moving! Honestly? Le Stupide is strong with this novel.

Next, Doc Melvin is killed by Eyewall - the other other organization whose name I'd forgotten because it’s so close to eyewash. Once again we see people being killed left, right, and center, and not a single Tempest agent kills a single EoT (oh, except for when Action Jackson kills one by accident and then breaks down in tears because of it - near enough). They're so passive and so reactive instead of being proactive that at this point I'm, fully rooting for the EoTs to completely wipe-out Tempest which has repeatedly proven itself to be a complete loser organization, clueless, and brain-dead.

This story keeps getting worse and there's less and less leavening to help it out. It's sad, because Cross obviously knows how to plot and write, and a lot of the story - especially in Tempest - was good, but Le Stupide crept in even there, and it’s been far worse in Vortex. I have to wonder what went wrong. It’s like she's lost her focus and is just tossing anything and everything in there to fluff up the story and is speed-writing it without properly thinking about what she's doing or how it will sound to the reader. I can put up with mistakes, and even with goofiness and plot holes if the story is engaging and the characters make me want to root for them but I can’t root for Le Stupide!

I really wanted to like this, and believe me, I tried. Even with some misgivings after Tempest, I tried volume two, but it just became harder and harder to take it seriously when we had multiple Hollys showing up, multiple Jacksons showing up, one of which killed one of the Hollys. Multiple Emilys, Mason resurrected, Courtney resurrected. It's nothing but an unholy mess. I've never been a fan of soap opera, and this is precisely what the Tempest series has turned into. Consequently, I will not be reading any further sequels in this series. I'm tempted to go back and change the rating on Tempest after this mess, but whatever I gave that, I'll let stand and just move on to greener pastures.


Saturday, March 30, 2013

Tempest by Julie Cross






Title: Tempest
Author: Julie Cross
Publisher: Thomas Dunne
Rating: Worthy!

I don't know Julie Cross, but she's a fellow blogspot blogger, and this is the first of her work that I've ever read (except for an interesting and very short story on her website). Hopefully it will be a pleasant change from the disastrous Hourglass from which I still have a bad taste in my mouth. This is another time travel novel but a (hopefully - again!) completely different from others I've read. The protagonist is a guy and he's nineteen and in college, so a bit older and hopefully a lot wiser than some characters I've had to deal with of late - let's see if this makes a difference! I'm always excited to start on a new novel, and always hopeful it won't let me down. Maybe that makes me an optimist, but I've been reading a lot of stories by women about women, so this being one by a woman about a guy might make it interesting enough by itself.

So at this point I've read through chapter six, and Cross certainly has no qualms about dropping her readers right into the middle of the action. There's no prologue as such, so props to her for that. There is a very short intro of some sort, which is more like one of those quotations writers like to start their chapters with, so I skipped that as usual. Chapter one puts you front and center with the male protag: Jackson Meyer.

'Jackson', as a name, is marginally off for me, but at least it's not 'Decker' or 'Kaleb', so I'm willing accept that one, even though to me, it feels more like the name you'd give a child rather than a college student. Yes, he's in college, not high school so again, props! He's also a volunteer taking care of kids, which is a refreshing change from the self-absorbed characters I've been reading about of late. Again, refreshingly different. He also already knows about his power of time travel and is actively investigating the limits of it with a friend called Adam, with whom he's shared his secret. Again, another great change from the usual "I don't know what the hell is happening to me" tripe. Or do I mean trope? What's the difference?

Jackson is in a bit of trouble with his girlfriend Holly, to whom he's said nothing of his experiments, leaving her to wonder where the heck he gets to on these investigatory excursions with Adam. Why he's chosen to tell Adam and not Holly (which happens to be one of my favorite names), I don't know. I get the feeling he's been friends a long time with Adam and has not known Holly anywhere near that long. And he's not going to know her much longer, either, because when he's visiting Holly in her dorm room, having bribed her obnoxious room mate to leave them alone overnight, two men arrive - apparently in full awareness of Jackson's power - and they shoot Holly!

Jackson reacts by jumping back in time, but this time he goes far further than he's ever been able to do before, even though it's only two years, to 2007. He tries to jump back, but ends up in his father's office. His father, evidently not recognizing him since Jackson is, in that time line, only 12, grabs him threateningly by the throat, and Jackson jumps back to 2007. Now what the heck is he going to do? I am excited to find out, and that's a good feeling to have when starting a new novel. One query: what's going on that when Jackson jumps, his body stays behind?! Where does his new body come from in the past if it's not his own body from that time line? That weirded me out, but at least it doesn't rob me of the premise for my own Timeless. Tempest actually reminds me of the really excellent Replay by Ken Grimwood, although it's not the same story by any means.

Chapter three weirded me out even more because I somehow couldn't find it when looking back through the pages, wondering how I had read so much so fast! I thought that Cross had gone from two straight to four, and I was interested in that because I thought it was part of the story, but then I realized I'm just blind, so that wasn't quite as odd and intriguing as it had seemed!

I had a chance to read some more of this waiting for GI Joe to start, and I'm up to chapter 15 now, and the story continues to intrigue and interest. Yes! Cross hasn't made me cross! Having made endless attempts to get out of 2007, Jackson decides to accept his fate - at least for now - and try to change Holly's future. To do this he needs to win Holly's trust and re-connect with his friend Adam, who isn't yet his friend in this time, and he needs to do this surreptitiously so as not to spook them or make them suspicious. He gets arrested using his future credit cards in a restaurant (they're all rejected!) and ends up having to call his father (despite some serious suspicions he holds about what his dad is up to) and pretend to be the seventeen-year-old version of himself.

I'd seen this (the credit cards) as a weakness in the story, so I'm glad Cross addressed it satisfactorily. Having thrown himself back into the hands of his father (and his father's intriguing assistant), he's as much relieved as he is concerned to discover that his 17 year old self is not in Spain, where he was supposed to have been at this point, so this actually helps Jackson's story - that he came home from Spain early because he was having problems. Since his 17 year-old self has now disappeared what, exactly, happened to him? This is another concern I'd, but which Cross has addressed and at the same time presented me with another conundrum (yes, conundrum Do you have a problem with that?!). So he tells his dad he wants to take a semester off school and sort himself out. So now he has a home base and some money.

Jackson manages to finagle a job for himself as a maintenance guy at the youth gymnastic facility where Holly works, so he's able to make her acquaintanceship in a legitimate way, but it's so hard for him not to be able to touch or hug or kiss her. Now all he has to do is win her trust and connect with Adam and he's home and dry, right? Right! We'll see where that goes, and I'm looking forward to finding out.

Disturbingly, Cross seems to know exactly which buttons to press (at least with me!) to keep me really interested in this novel. Perhaps she time travels and has spied on her readers, making changes in the past to fix problems we had in the future reading this?! How ever she does it, this is such a refreshing change after some of the material I've had to wade through of late. The characters continue to be believable and to act realistically, and she has not let up once in keeping the twists twisting and the action out of left field coming thick and fast. This is a great novel and I'm about two-thirds the way through it now, so my optimism is high and I am looking forward to getting my hands on the sequel. I am so envious of her writing and plotting!

Having said that, I have to put in a complaint about her annoying habit of slipping in flashbacks without changing the tense or offering any other indication - such as indenting or changing font - so unless you focus really closely, you’re really not certain where the flashback starts and ends. I'm not sure if she does this on purpose to try and make us feel as time-lagged and confused as Jackson is, or whether it’s just careless writing - careless as in not giving any thought to it or careless as in not caring enough about what effect it has on us the readers - take your pick! I find it a bit distracting. Just saying!

Jackson in 2007 with the 17-year-old Holly has such an endearing befuddlement about how he should relate to her. When you read something like this in a novel it’s hard to tell if it’s what the author thinks or if it’s what the author has determined that this particular character should think. I feel in this case that this isn't what Cross herself feels, but it’s what she wants Jackson to be feeling, and it’s fun to learn that (or to think I learned that!). I'm not sure if it fits Jackson's character properly.Technically, 17 may be juvenile, but not in Texas, not if the other partner is within 3 years of the younger partner's age and the younger partner is at least 14 years old. I think Texas is too liberal - and surprisingly so, given what a conservative state Texas actually is, but I don’t know what the laws are elsewhere, so I can't speak for Jackson's position in NYC. In my opinion, 17 definitely isn’t a juvenile in any meaningful sense, but again you have to relate that to the partner and what their motives are, especially if the partner is male! Ultimately, of course, it ought to be related to how mature the individuals involved are, but as we all know, laws are made only to the lowest common denominator and they punish as much as they protect in all-too-many instances. In this case, Jackson is out of his element, tired, scared, confused, deathly worried about Holly, and so I'm going to go with it and not let it concern me any more other than to share these observations.

Jackson takes a trip back to visit Courtney in the past and fix something he did which he feels bad about. He's supposed to be resting since this time travel is really wearing on him, and he's so exhausted from this trip that he passes out at work. Adam shows up and they decide that this is a golden opportunity to find out about his medical records, so he calls Jackson's dad who shows up post-haste. Jackson is taken to the hospital to meet his doctor (on a Sunday!) and is scanned and tested up the wazoo (and elsewhere) to figure out what this fainting means. He finally gets to have his dad confess that both he and his sister are adopted. This is a game changer. But the whole purpose of this exercise was for Jackson to get a look at his medical records, and he shows no interest in doing so even when a golden opportunity presents itself. I have a problem with that, but given what else went on here, I think we can let that slide.

The big revelation is his adoption and his discovery that he spent the first 11 months of his life with someone else. His "dad" isn’t forthcoming about who that was. The "twins", Jackson and Courtney, had two different mothers! Imagine what a huge disruption this all is for Jackson. I feel really bad for him!

Jackson gets a text from Adam to meet him at a museum on Monday morning at 9:30 and he runs into Holly. It turns out that she appropriated Adam's phone when they were pulling an all-night study session because she wanted to play hooky from the museum field trip, and she has chosen Jackson to be her partner in crime. She already has a backpack full of snacks and a blanket, so they hike over to Central Park. I'm not as sure as Cross evidently is that it would be that easy to pull this off, but my high school never once took me on a field trip, so who knows. I hated high school. I sincerely hope it isn't this easy to disappear from a school field trip!

The problem is that their excursion goes south fast. It starts out beautifully, with the two of them drawing closer and closer, and Jackson feeling better about his circumstances than he has felt since he first arrived in 2007, but as they walk through a wooded part of the park the guy who killed Holly in 2009 shows up like he just left that time and place and came straight here! But there is something even more bizarre than this, which is that Jackson's dad and Jenni Stewart (the one who sprung Jackson from jail that time) show up and kick some ass and rescue the two of them.

Jackson's suspicions were right - his dad really is a Central Intelligence Agent - no doubt why he was in Central Park - right?! I have some concerns/observations here. The assailant guy has red hair and so does Jackson's "twin sister" Courtney. Could the red-haired guy be related to Courtney? Might she have been assassinated rather than died from cancer? Is her chronic nervousness related to something which was done to her and Jackson - something which she didn’t survive? The other thing is, why didn’t Jackson's dad and/or Jenni Stewart rescue him in 2009, before Holly was shot?

Later that day at work, Jackson and Holly are very awkward with each other after what happened in the park, but it gets resolved in a really cute paint fight and a scene in the clean-up room afterwards, until Jackson's dad shows up again, telling Jackson he needs to come with him right away. Jackson goes with him only to be knocked out in the car by having a cloth slapped over his face that's been impregnated with some chemical or other. Again up with the notching. Jackson wakes up to find he’s in a secret location, which is why he was knocked out. The doctor is there together with a man they call Chief, and whom Jackson has seen before on more than one occasion.

Here's where Cross really slips up for me. There's a time travel gene just like in the excellent Ruby Red (reviewed elsewhere in this blog), and just like in the execrable Hourglass disdained elsewhere in this blog. I have to say again that it’s very rare for a single gene to do something major, although it happens. Usually it's a gene network or family which is in control of a trait or a set of traits. We don't typically get one gene doing something major, like giving the X-men their powers, or the 'Heroes' their powers! I have a bigger problem, however, with this being a part of evolution as Cross explicitly references. Evolution isn't intelligent design. It doesn’t plan anything. It isn't trying to make things smarter and more complex. All it is, is a sieve, when you get right down to it.

Charles Darwin himself explained, over one hundred and fifty years ago, that every individual is different and more individuals are born than will survive. Darwin didn’t know this was down to genetics, but he did know that if an individual had a beneficial difference - a difference which came to it not through planning or intelligence, but through happenstance - and that individual found itself in a position where that difference gave it a survival and reproductive advantage, then the difference would more than likely be propagated through that individuals descendants and thereby through that species. These small changes are known to lead to advancements in a species (advancements, that is, in survival and reproductive success, not necessarily in making it smarter), and eventually, in a successful species, very likely into changing that species, over time, into a different species, so different form it’s ancestors that it can no longer breed with others of its (former) kind.

So yeah, there's a lot of random, but natural selection isn't at all random; quite the opposite. So here’s the problem: how would a time travel gene, even if the ability could be conveyed by a single gene, provide any kind of advantage, let alone a survival or reproductive advantage? Cross has offered nothing yet to explain that. She does mention that it’s recessive, which means it’s the shy, retiring gene out of the gene pair (all your genes are paired: pretty much one from mom, one from dad). This means that it has a tendency to persist in your genome even if it doesn't convey any real advantage, because other than killing off an individual, evolution has no good way of cleaning up garbage in your genome - which is why some 90+ percent of your genome is junk: repetitive non-gene segments, broken genes, pseudo genes, viral remnants, et cetera.So this might explain the persistence, but not where it came from. Pretty much all of our evolution was done not by us, but by bacteria in the three billion years or so when the Earth was dominated by bacteria and nothing else. Earth still is dominated by bacteria, of course, but now there’s a tiny smattering of other organisms, creatures with multiple cells, which we in our blind ignorance foolishly think of as "nature". The bulk of what has happened since then, in the last half billion years or so, really has been little more than tweaking and retasking existing genes to new uses. So where did the time travel gene originate? From which gene did it evolve? Or was it inserted somehow - and by whom? Cross has one of the characters tell us that this time travel has been around for a long time - far longer than we have been able to insert genes into organisms, but she doesn’t mention how this is known.

Anyway, that's my pet peeve, and now I'm willing to put that aside and continue to enjoy what continues to be an excellent story despite a small misgiving here and there! So Jackson and Holly grow closer at a mixer her dad arranged at his apartment home to encourage her to feel a bit more at ease with the whole CIA involvement angle. She's definitely pushing Jackson to become more intimate, but he's resisting valiantly. The next morning he wakes up with a hangover, and finds he's had a small removable appliance inserted into his ear while he slept, which taught him how to understand Farsi. He can't speak it; only understand it. What that's all about remains to be seen, but he hardly has time to ponder this when three agents from the EoT - the Enemies of Time (seriously?!!) - pop into this time-space and say they want to talk. They try to reason with Jackson and tell him a few home truths, but it breaks down into violence and two of them escape, but the third is shot and remains behind. Jackson is horrified when, after a brief interrogation, his own dad cold-bloodedly puts two more bullets into him.

Jackson doesn't react well to this at all and the Chief slams him up against a wall and puts a choke hold on him convinced that he's not told them everything. Jackson jumps away to the date his "sister" died and sits by her bedside. He's the only one there. She fails to panic over his aged appearance because she's so drugged. He vows to stay with her to the end. She demands that he marry his girlfriend and have six children. But it's time to have a word about the red-headed child of the family. Jackson has been seeing young redheads and often has a déjà vu feeling that it's his young sister, but the one time he went to the girl and tapped her on the shoulder, he was mistaken. But there have been other times when she has disappeared on him. I'm convinced that his sister is alive in another time line and that she has been traveling through time for a long time.

In other news, his father gives him a date and time and place and asks that he do one of his 'half-jumps' (whatever that is), whereupon Jackson sees his much younger father with himself as a toddler, and his sister, and a woman called Eileen, who actually carried the "twins" although none of her genes were in either one of them. It turns out that his father wanted to marry her and raise the toddlers as a family, but was denied the chance when Eileen was shot as Jackson now witnesses. Jackson took the gun out of his pocket and kills the guy who shoots her. It was the redhead who has been following him. Is this Courtney's real father - brother?

So Jackson, his dad, Adam, and Holly take a sailboat out to find a private place to talk. This seemed way too contrived to me, especially given that no sooner have they done that than a storm blows up and a strange guy appears on the boat whom Jackson's dad shoots. They head back to shore, and they spot a small red headed girl on a dock. Jackson leaps into the water and swims to her. She's a time jumper as we'd figured, but she's not Courtney, as I'd figured. The girl, Emily, gives him a diamond ring and tells him she has been sent by Jackson himself. I think she's Jackson and Holly's daughter from the future, which is where she takes him. Jackson doesn't grasp that she's his daughter (or maybe she's not! Let's face it my guesses suck!), but he goes with her and discovers that NYC is a wasteland, destroyed by something. This is what he needed to see.

Jackson has a gun with him but at no point does he ever use it! Not when wild dogs come after them, not when three other jumpers come after them, not when he jumps back to the present with Emily (who promptly departs for her own time). Nor does he even think of using his gun when he's back with Holly and no matter that three more armed jumpers show up in the hotel, and a gunfight ensues. Why? I have absolutely zero idea. This is really a let down, because I don't think for a second that if known villains are threatening your family, one of whom you know for a fact is going to shoot one of your loved one in two months time, and here they are threatening her right now, and you have a gun right there, that you would hesitate to shoot!

Worse than this, however, is that evidently every one in the CIA is a lousy shot, since no one gets shot here! Worse than that, even knowing he can be jumped through time, Jackson grabs hold of one of the villains even when he has a gun on her and could have shot her and been done with the dire threat she posed. He ends up in the past and has to jump back to the future, again with her. Now they're on the roof of the hotel and although he's pissed as hell at her he still doesn't shoot her. Fortunately for him, someone else does shoot her - we don't know who. Then Thomas - the big villain boss man shows up on the roof with Holly as his prisoner. Despite this, he claims he wants to harm no one: he only wants Jackson to hear the other side of the story. Which is patent nonsense of course, because he's a time jumper for goodness sakes. He could have seen to it that Jackson heard his side at any time he wanted, even if it meant emailing him or typing it up in a double-spaced essay and mailing it to him! But anyway, I'm interested in his side of the story, especially if it can dig the tale out of the doldrums it's just dropped into!

So Thomas now takes Jackson into the future, and he sees a whole different one from the one Emily had shown him. In this one, Earth is taken care of, no pollution, no violence, no bad health. Too perfect to be true. Jackson tries to appear as though he's going along with Thomas, but when they jump back, Thomas takes Holly and throws her off the hotel roof as some sort of test. Jackson doesn't hesitate for a second. He jumps off after her, grabs her arm, and jumps with her onto a soft grass landing. Now if this is supposed to be cool, I'm not impressed because it's wrong in so many ways.

One thing Cross seems to have forgotten here is that heavier objects don't fall faster than lighter ones. We've known this since from around Galileo's time (and it was theorized earlier than that): gravity pulls everything at the same rate, so if Holly went off first, Jackson could not catch up with her, especially on drop of eight stories, which would take her about four seconds to complete! Even if he did (say, she flattened herself out and presented her maximum area to the wind resistance and Jackson went off head first to minimize his) they would still have the same downward momentum, so unless he landed in something really soft, then both of them would still die, yet they find themselves lying in soft grass with zero momentum. Oh well.

So Jackson now knows that he can jump non-time-travelers. Perhaps Thomas knew this and did what he did so Jackson would learn it. Perhaps Thomas is pure evil. We don't know. The two of them get up and start looking for a newspaper, and learn that they're three days in the past, but as soon as they find that out, two jumpers arrive with a second Holly. Time for Jackson to jump with his Holly again, but like a moron he jumps right back to where they left - on the roof! And of course, he finds himself facing a gun held by Thomas. Seriously? I've been on board with Cross throughout this thing despite a few clunkers here and there, but these last few pages are really irking and frustrating me. She can do a lot better than this - we know she can, so why this now?

After that the book kinda fizzles. Thomas pulls out some of Jackson's hair and Jackson immediately realizes he's going to use that to create Emily (another wrong guess of mine!), so Jackson lets him go. Then he realizes that as long as Holly is with him, she can be used as leverage, so he jumps back to 2009 and makes that this home base - again - and he avoids bumping into her on the step that day and so changes the future: now, he's never met her. But what difference does that make if there are a gazillion Hollys in a gazillion time lines and he's met her in at least a few of those?

This was a really poor "ending" to a brilliant novel. I plan on reading Vortex, the sequel in the hope it will be as good as Tempest - but all the way through! And I recommend this novel. I'm sure most other people aren't quite as critical as I am, and I really enjoyed 90% of it!.


Sunday, January 20, 2013

Time Riders by Alex Scarrow

Rating: WARTY!

Alex Scarrow is another English author, although the story gets properly underway New York City, not in England. The chapters in TimeRiders are very short, fortunately.

Scarrow has signed a deal with Puffin for nine books in the TimeRiders series, six of which are already available. He's a fortunate author! There's an interesting interview with him in the British newspaper The Guardian which makes me think that, in some regards, he has his head screwed on right with his general approach to this series, but I have to wonder at his comments in that interview. "'I've worked really hard to make TimeRiders absolute cocaine". Cocaine? When he's talking about a series for children as young as 11 (which at the time was the age of his own son, and by whom he runs his story ideas!)?

Clearly Scarrow sees 'TimeRiders' as one weird word, yet his book covers deliberately split that into two separate words. This is yet another example of the unfortunate disconnect between what the author perceives and writes, and what Big Publishing™ does to that when they make the book! This is why I'm glad, for better or for worse, that I do my own covers.

You can argue, if you wish, that the covers are designed by professionals, and therefore ought to be better at reaching an audience and drawing people in, than something which an author might come up with by themselves, but for me, it's almost never the design on the cover which draws me in to a novel and I can’t remember ever buying a novel because the cover caught my eye. Once in a while, yes: with Ruby Red, for example, it was the cover which did catch my eye, but it wasn't the specific design of that cover, just the brightness of it and the title. Yes, I confess, I'm a magpie! And if I hadn’t liked the story, I wouldn’t have picked it no matter how pretty the cover was!

So now you're going to argue, "Well, at least the cover made you look!"? Think of it this way - if you're wandering through a bookstore or a library, you’re not looking for a pretty cover, you're looking for a title or an author, and you don't see the covers, you see only the spines, for the most part. Of course, more and more, people are discovering these books online, where the cover image is displayed and perhaps plays a greater part, but even there, the cover is usually a thumbnail, so it’s hardly leaping out at you! And if you're picking up a book because it’s the next in a series, or because it has good buzz, or because someone you trust recommended it, do you honestly care what the cover looks like?

Were the Harry Potter devotees going to flatly refuse to read the seventh book if it had had a plain black cover with grey lettering? No! Would those curious about 50 Shades of Grey declare "I'm not reading that trash!" and refuse to buy it if the cover had featured a wizened old man on it? I seriously doubt it!

But as long as we're ont he cover, what's with that little catch-phrase on the TimeRiders cover: "Mess around with time and the world you know could become a world you don’t"? Seriously? That's the best they could come up with?! You know, once in a while these guys who do this stuff come up with something really cool or funny. I can think of movie tag lines like "Chucky Gets Lucky" and "The Coast is Toast" (not that either of those was attached to a worthwhile movie, but he lines were fun). "Where there's a Willis there's a Wayans" was very amusing, but the movie was not so entertaining. It’s a pity they didn’t have something better for TimeRiders.

OK, enough whining! In the Guardian interview, Scarrow says, "No bad guy does the stuff he does just because he's evil. They do it because, in a warped and twisted way, they think they're doing the right thing. History is full of blokes trying to do the right thing and murdering millions." I have to disagree. They do it because they're selfish and paranoid swine, that's why they do it, thinking only of themselves and of satisfying their own compulsions. They're not thinking of doing good or of improving the lives of others! Later, Scarrow says, "...it would be great to have some really cool products, books that feel sexy..." Sexy? For books he runs by an 11 year old? Oooo-kay!

After reading that, I had to wonder if maybe his head isn't so well screwed on!

OTOH his books have been successful, so he's obviously appealing to someone no matter how inappropriate his descriptions of what he's doing might seem to me (and no matter how lackluster the covers might be!).

TimeRiders is a book that starts out well. We find ourselves on deck E of the RMS Titanic on April 15th 1912 around 2:15am, and trust me, this is not a place and time you ever want to be.

Unfortunately for 16 year old Liam O'Connor, he is there, and has just finished ensuring that the deck is clear of passengers, when he realizes that ice cold North Atlantic water now covers the exit and stairwell which would lead him up to safety (relatively speaking - this is the Titanic, after all!). As he starts to wade into the bitterly cold water, hoping he can still get out, an old man named Foster appears behind him, essentially giving him the Arnold Schwarzeneggar line from Terminator 2: "Come with me if you want to live".

Liam grabs his hand and wakes to find himself in the bottom of a set of bunk beds, with a strange woman stirring in her sleep across from him and a young girl in the top bunk opposite. Next we're with Madelaine (Maddy) Carter in an airplane and there's Foster informing her that the plane will very soon be bursting into flame and crashing, killing everyone aboard. She takes his hand. She finds herself waking to look at a 16 year old boy dressed like a ship's steward might in 1912....

Unlike the Titanic, which was a real disaster, there were no big crashes of airplanes over the USA in 2010, according to wikipedia's List of accidents and incidents involving commercial aircraft, so Scarrow made that one up, which makes me wonder why. Neither was there a Liam O'Connor on the Titanic. The third member of what becomes the Time Riders crew is Saleena (Sal) Vikram, a 13 year old girl who was rescued by Foster in 2026, so we can't check on that. Interestingly, hers is the only disaster about which we learn nothing other than that it was a fire.

After we meet the crew we're introduced to Dr. Paul Kramer and his team of paramilitary guys who are occupying the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, which is closed and boarded up. Kramer wants to find the time machine which a guy named Waldstein invented based on theories by a Chinese guy. Waldstein, after taking only one trip back in his machine to visit his (by then) dead wife and child came back a changed man, having seen something horrible, and promptly (so he claimed), destroyed his machine. He didn't.

Now Kramer is making use of his machine for his own ends, and it's up to the Time Riders, of which this little New York contingent is only one element, so we're told (more on this anon) to prevent any misuse of time travel.

The further I got into this novel the more issues I had with it, but I'm a real sucker for a time-travel romp so, like the patient judge in a movie trial, I was willing to allow this line of questionable to see where it led. And I'm trying to keep in mind that it was written for people younger than I am, people who are perhaps less discriminating, or less demanding than I can be!

Moving right along now… after the intrepid three are gathered here together in unholy matrix-money, we learn that there's a fourth: some sort of cyborg, which is essentially nothing more than a copy of Arnold Schwarzeneggar's Terminator from T2. He was grown in a vat, and now he's dumped out, whereupon his brain boots up, and he has to learn a few things which somehow were omitted from his programming. They call him Bob and he talks about 'mission parameters' and such, just as Schwarzeneggar's character did. In fact, if I recall, isn’t the Terminator actually called Bob at one point in that movie?!

We also learn why these people were selected - supposedly. Liam is the adventurer who gets to go on missions with Bob, even though he's probably the least qualified to cope with this (being only 16 and coming from 1912). I have to wonder - other than that this is a YA novel - why they have these kids when they could have special forces-trained people, or CIA-trained people? Liam certainly steps up (to begin with) and surprisingly shows very little surprise or wonder about the technological marvels he encounters, which would have been impressive enough in the World War 2 era, let alone in 2001, but he appears to have little abiding fascination or curiosity about anything.

In fact, up through around chapter 40 (I did say they're short chapters!) the only one of the three who shows any personality or interest is the only one of them who actually is from the future (in relation to us), which is Sal, who says 'jahulla' a heck of a lot (just as Liam says 'jay-zus' a heck of a lot). I dont; know what jahulla means. It may refer to a disbelief in any gods, or even a depopulated village of that name. Intriguingly, given that Sal's from India, where only some 12% of the population speak English, she has an amazing grasp not only of English, but also of contemporary American idiom! Hmm! Maddy cluelessly claims that eveyone from India is bilingual. Wrong!

Anyway, whilst Liam is out there being manly, the two girls have to be stay-at-home moms, analysing the time line to see if they can discern any tampering. Yes, I know women tend to be better at this kind of detail work than men, but seriously? This is 2001, not 1901. Well, no, this isn’t 2001, but that's where they're inexplicably ensconced for this work - inside a continuously looping time-bubble which goes from September 10th, 2001 to September 11th, 2001, rinse and repeat. Yes, that 9/11.

The computer they have is from the future, yet they're relying on fallible humans to spot critical changes! That seems a bit weak to me. Why they're located in 2001 isn't really explained, either. The claim is that it’s because the events of that next day will serve to iron out any bumps in the timeline which they may cause by living there, but it seems to me that they could achieve that same aim by living out in the wilds of Montana or the plains of Africa, or some bushland area in Australia, or even by living a regular existence in the future where all this policing originated!

And having been told all this about the delicacy of the timeline, the first experiment they try, to see how good Sal and Maddy are at spotting and nailing down discrepancies in the timeline, is to prevent Oswald from killing Kennedy. They can do this because it 'resets itself' immediately afterwards, after that grassy knoll gunman makes up for Oswald's failure, but they never go back and re-reset it so that our own timeline - where the grassy knoll guy is a conspiracy theory at best, and Oswald is the sole shooter - comes back online! That was an inexplicable gaff.

What concerns me too, about this, is that they appear to think that if they're contained within their two-day looping time bubble, then they won't be affected by a change in the timeline and will therefore be able to spot it and fix it, but since only their small cellar is bubbled, I have to wonder how they'd cope with changes to the immediate environment outside their bubble. What if their water or electricity cuts off? This may not seem important, since you think their time bubble always has the same exterior view, but this becomes a real issue when the timeline actually does change. You knew it would, didn’t you?!

There's one other problem. At one point, Foster quietly advises Maddy that Liam is going to age just as he has. Foster, despite being an old man, is evidently only 27, but he is going to die from the aging effect of time-traveling so much.

But that's not the problem. Maddy isn’t supposed to tell Liam about this aging issue until he's ready for the news, and he's apparently the only one it will affect, but the fact is that all three of them are actually traveling in time every two days by living in their time bubble. Why is the aging only a problem for Liam? Is there something else going on with his extra jumps? We're not told.

There's also a problem with the method by which they jump; to jump out, the traveler has to be submerged in a vat of water, wearing only their underwear (again taking the idea from Terminator), but to return, they just step through a shimmering window in the air, bringing with them whatever they’re carrying and wearing. Seriously? What’s up with that? The claim is that it's to prevent anything traveling back into the past and contaminating the time line. If that wasn't necessary when they moved the supercomputer from the future back to 2001 and occupied a cellar, then I don’t get why this persnikettiness with the clothes is necessary. Nor is it explained why they don’t have to get into a vat of water every 24 hours to travel back to September 10th!

Every time they jump they're sending back several thousand gallons of water full of bacteria not only from 2001, but also from whence the computer and all the materials came when they initially set up that cellar! Sending back that much water is also impacting the current time line to an extent, but I guess this is trivial enough to not be noticed. Oh well! Given how well the series is selling, I guess not too many people are bothered by these details!

So then we’re introduced to the villain of the piece, Paul Kramer, who has the brilliant plant to locate this time machine that was supposedly destroyed (but which he knows was not) and use it to change history and make a better planet.

How does he choose to do this? Does he make himself rich and invest wisely in things which will improve the world? Nope! Does he place himself in influential positions with world leaders to lure them into a wise and bright future? Nope! Instead, he finds the most brutal military in the world - the Nazis of World War 2 - and advises their leader, Adolf Hitler, not to embark on his disastrous invasion of Russia, and he gives them military technology from 2066, thereby consolidating their hold on Europe and facilitating the invasion of Britain, before setting sights on the USA, by which time Kramer has contrived to be der Führer, evidently by bumoping off Hitler, but Hitler's birthday is mentioned somewhere and he;s a ripe old age! I suppose they could have been celebrating his birthday even though he was dead. Anyway, all this slaughter and war is supposed to somehow make the world a better place.

Meanwhile, back in 2001, as they go about their daily business, Sal goes out for a walk every day, and gets to see the twin towers come down. Every day. Her job is to notice anything that's changed from her previous walks - as an early warning that someone has messed with the timeline. She's supposed to have been chosen for her observational skills, but that seems appallingly hit and miss to me, especially given that she's outside the protective time bubble during these walks!

After Sal's change of life alert (lol!), Maddy is supposed to scour the Internet to find out exactly what the change was and why it happened so they can fix it. Frankly, a computer from the future ought to be able to do this faster and far more efficiently than a human, but there you go! And of course, if the change results in the Internet going down or never being invented, then Maddy has no backup whatsoever. There are apparently no books in the cellar! Trust me, this happens.

So on one of her morning jaunts, Sal sees change occur all around her right when that first jetliner is supposed to hit the north tower and doesn't. Given that the change was initiated by Kramer in 1941, why she sees nothing for several days, and then sees it only as the jet fails to hit (and indeed the towers disappear, changing into something else), is a mystery! Everything changes around her and she heads back to their bubble, and here's where it starts to get really questionable! On a side note, the Kehlsteinhaus doesn't exactly look like it's the kind of place that you can assault successfully with just 24 men when it's guarded by machine-gun nests! But that's just my opinion!

Maddy discovers that all information about history prior to 1956 has been erased! She can’t learn anything about what happened before that date. So what do they do? Send someone back to a quiet place in 1955, so they can see if there were any warning signs portending change? Nope! They go back actually to 1956!

Do they at least try to go somewhere quiet so they can enter unobtrusively and complete a useful investigation? Nope! They deposit Liam and Bob right on the White House lawn! Seriously! The very place where no matter what happened, short of the White House being demolished, you would stand out like a sore thumb is where they send them, and as it happens they end up right in the middle of a Nazi assault on the White House! I'm sorry but this level of incompetence is not even remotely believable, not even in a sotry which is slipping as much as this one has been to this point.

This gaff results in Liam getting captured. Bob, who has the chance to return and update Foster, Sal, and Maddy on what’s happening, deliberately misses his return window to try and save Liam who, he has decided, is his friend and therefore more important than the mission! You know, this sounds a lot worse now I'm reviewing it than it did when I was actually reading it at lunchtime!

Now Maddy, Sal, and Foster are completely and utterly in the dark about what's happened to change the world, and also have no idea what happened to Bob and Liam, and they can do nothing to fix the main problem, nor to help the errant explorers.

Worse than this, by opening the window when they expected Bob and Liam to return, they let a Nazi soldier through, and his injuries when they tossed him back out, have now alerted Kramer to the fact that someone might be able to time travel and might be able to interfer with Kramer's plan. Kramer destroyed his time machine so he cannot change his place in time any more, but he can erase all records prior to 1956 to try and disguise what he has done to change the timeline.

So do our heroes send someone back to alert Sal, on one of her jaunts outside, so she can avoid sending Liam and Bob back to 1956 and popping them out onto the White House Lawn? Nope. That never occurs to them! Nor does the question of what might have happened to Maddy in this new time line. If she didn’t get on that same plane, which might not even exist in this timeline, then how could Foster rescue her and bring her into the team? I guess history hasn't changed that much!

Part of Alex Scarrow's background is in developing video games, and this becomes quite evident in the final part of TimeRiders. I started out with hopes for this, especially when I realized that it is a series and if I like it, there would be more to come, but the more I read it, and worse, the more I blog it, the more my opinion of it deteriorates! At this point, I'm ready to assign this a rating of WARTY!

You recall what I said earlier, about the team not taking any steps to secure their location in terms of water and power supplies? Well this comes to haunt them as the city around them changes again. There's no explanation whatsoever in the novel as to why it changes a second time - until almost at the end, where long after they've seen the event's results, Kramer evdiently triggers the event that they have already seen! Better living through irradiation! And a major screw-up by Scarrow IMO.

The city is wiped out and rendered into rubble, and this results in their time-bubble losing power completely, but their little cellar remains utterly untouched by this nuclear devastation! It’s unharmed and completely free from nuclear fallout!

NYC is also infested with zombies now! Actually, they're not really zombies; they're apparently mutant humans who are cannibals. How this happened is conveniently not explained. At this point I got the distinct impression that Scarrow is not interested in writing a novel, but is, instead, intent upon cobbling together video game scenes from his previous career and weakly linking them together in the deserate hope of creating a coherent narrative. He fails. I also started to think that I don’t want to read another eight of these novels if they're going to be this clueless, this loosely wrapped, and this gratuitously gruesome in what's supposed to be a young adult novel for for an 11 year old.

Foster and the girls embark on a trip to the subway to find some diesel fuel to power the generator. Yes, this advanced computer from the future relies not on solar power or some other kind of alternative energy, but on a good, old-fashioned, stinky, polluting diesel generator! The team go in search of the diesel without even taking with them the means to haul it back, and so they can bring back only a few gallons - not enough to open a decent window until ther end of the novel, conveniently. These people personify incompetence: Foster doesn’t know squat about diesel or the generator, and he's their leader! But they do manage to get the generator running.

Meanwhile, back in 1957, Bob has become a superhero. Here's another inexplicable event: although it's been only a few days in 2001, it’s been six months in 1957! How this occurred, as usual, remains totally unexplained and makes no sense whatsoever. Having jeopardized their mission in order to save Liam, Bob is raiding prison camps to try to find and free his friend, at which he eventually succeeds, starting a minor insurrection in the process. Meanwhile, back in the airship, Kramer is losing it. He's hearing voices which are telling him to destroy the world by hooking an atom bomb to a time-travel field generator, which will effectively destroy the entire planet - or at least the life on it. Now won't that make for a better world?! Shades of Stargate the movie!

Bob gets a tachyon message from Foster giving him the time and coordinates in DC where the next window will open. Tachyons are actually still theoretical at this time, btu maybe the're discovered in 2066!

Bob takes this opportunity to inform Liam that he has an expiration date: if Bob doesn't return to his starting time within six months he will self destruct (with no override) to prevent his technology from falling into enemy hands. After six months???? Seriously, if he had been captured, in six months, every secret he ever had stored in his computerised brain would be public knowledge! But this means they only have a few days now to return to 2001 or Bobby go boom fall down dead!

They return to DC and the window opens but it’s only the size of someone's head! Bob demands that Liam cut off his head and toss it through, but Liam, who I unfortunately described earlier as stepping up, wimps out. They could have shouted the information through the little window for goodness sakes, telling the rest of the team to destroy Kramer in April 1941, since they have the exact location, date, and time for his initial incursion by then, but instead, they whine and argue about cutting off Bob's head until the window closes. For heaven's sake, Bob could have stuck his head through the window and had it cut off as the window closed, leaving the invaluable information on the other side of the window, but he whines and argues with Liam instead! Incompetence, thy name is TimeRiders!

So Liam, in a flash of brilliance, now determines that the best way to communicate is to go the the natural history museum and write a message in the visitor book, which Sal will then miraculously think of looking for when 2001 comes around. And of course both the book and the museum will completely avoid destruction and burning during the nuking of NYC. Of course they will!

But do they write in the book that Foster and the girls must attack Kramer in 1941 so they can restore the timeline and save the world? No! Why on Earth would they do that when they can write the coordinates and the time they will be in the cellar in NYC, so that the window can be conveniently opened at low power to rescue the two of them instead?! And this is the team Foster praises as being the best?

The weird thing is that Foster tells his team at the start of the novel that they're not the only team: there are others dotted throughout the world in other places and at other times, yet apparently not a one of these other teams can step up and save the world! Nope, it's all on these incompetent airhead teenagers in 2001 in NYC!

So the 2001 team returns to the cellar (from their jaunt to read the miraculously preserved visitor book) only to be ambushed by the cannibals, and thirteen year old Sal is wrenched from them. A thirteen year old girl is torn away to be eaten by mutant cannibals and this is suitable reading for an 11 year old? And I worried about what's in Seasoning YA!? I need to reset my sights!

Moving right along now! They make it to the cellar thinking that if they reset the maladjusted timeline, Sal will be magically restored to them with no memory of being cannibalized, and to heck with the horror they just witnessed! They start preparing to open the window to rescue Liam and Bob, only to find that these enterprising and industrious cannibals, who are supposed to be smart, yet evidently can’t seem to think of evacuating the food-free nuclear wasteland of NYC, to go hunting animals in the wilds, are breaking down the walls of the cellar to get at them!

Well the story kinda fizzeled (more!) towards the end. Liam and Bob both get pulled back just in time to help Maddy and Foster fight off the cannibals, then they're sent back to 1941 (I guess that fuel was sufficient after all) where they kill Kramer and thereby reset the timeline back to where it was, no harm no foul!

Given how obsessed they are about not polluting the timeline, there seem to be no after effects of not only sending them back with no water and with out-of-period clothes, but also of leaving the bodies lying around back in 1941 in a case where, in the initial and 'pure' timeline, there never were any bodies. But there you go. Foster heads off into the sunset to live out his remaining time, leaving teenager Maddy in charge of teenagers Liam and Sal, running the New York office. And also in charge of deciding when she gets to give Liam the bad news about his death warrant, something Foster has clearly chickened out of. The end.

Yes, I have to say I was let down by the improbabilities in this; particularly that these kids are put in charge of a really, really crucial organization (and especially so with essentially no training), and by the fact that none of the other field offices seem to be of any use whatsoever, leaving all the work of fixing time lines to be done by these selfsame teens! Yes, it’s a YA novel and it would be stupid to have one with no YA's in it, but honestly?! There were ways I could see of telling this same story and getting these same situations and results without taking such huge leaps of faith or staining it quite so brightly with hamfistedness.

There's pretty much no information related at all about the three main characters, given that they figure hugely throughout the story. They almost dont; even interact with each other as normal teens would (is there such a thing as a normal teen?!). Why was Liam, a 16 year old from 1912, considered to be the best candidate for a field agent? Why are we told effectively nothing about Sal's rescue from her death whereas we're party to both Liam's and Maddy's rescue? Why go to the trouble, expense, and risk of failure in creating a 'Bob' when they could have simply had a special forces soldier, a SWAT cop, or a CIA or FBI agent, for example?

I had originally thought this might be nice new series to get into, but then I read it and now I can’t see myself reading another of these. It’s borderline at best, and had it been smarter, I would have been willing to try another shot even with some of the problems it has, but as it is, I have better things to do with my time. This is the first YA story I can remember feeling this way about, actually. Most of the others have been acceptable even if they weren't exactly overwhelming. Some of them have been really great. Maybe my kids will take it up at some point and then they can write the reviews!