Author: Amy Herrick
Publisher: High Bridge Audio
Rating: WORTHY!
Very competently read by Luci Christian
This is one of the rare occasions where I don’t start the review until after I finish the book, which means I have to review the book - literally - to write the review. Weird. The basis of the novel is that there's a parallel world inhabited by creatures which live off time energy - rather like the Weeping Angels, of Doctor Who fame. They periodically open a portal into this world and travel through in a tiny ship (the Fetch) that looks like a rock. They exit the Fetch and wander off like tiny flies, harvesting the moments in time which will not be missed - that minute or two you zoned-out? They took it. That hour you were having so much fun that it zoomed by? They filleted it.
There's a problem here in Herrick's logic in that she offers nothing to show how these little "Time Flies" (lol!) discern what are non-missable moments. How do they know how to take ones which will not be missed - which will cause no harm? Or do they simply take whatever and we subsequently perceive it as zoning-out or time flying by? That latter explanation makes more sense given what comes later, but Herrick doesn't make it clear. The problem is that there's a queen in each Fetch, and she calls the Time Flies back before they can gobble up every moment, so clearly they don’t have any way to know what they're doing. They're just parasites. The queen dies in singing them back, but the Fetch seals them in and it’s safe, ready for retrieval. The problem is that in this novel, some of them escape, they start multiplying and literally do start eating all the time (so to speak; this is such fun to write!).
The time gobblers disguise the Fetch like a rock because people ignore rocks, but this shows a serious deficit in Herrick's understanding, I feel. OTOH, she had to have something which would be stolen or the Fetch would never have got off the ground. Literally. I'm loving this! The problem is that people pick up rocks. They collect them. They throw them. They skim them off water surfaces. If the time fetchers really didn’t want their ship to be disturbed, they should have designed it to look like bird droppings, or something like that! But they didn’t.
Edward's school project was to go to the park and find a rock representative of a moraine deposit. He didn’t. Edward is a slacker who tries to be invisible so he can glide through life with the least hassle. He picks up a rock from under a tree in his yard on the way to school that morning, and it's the Fetch, of course. Now that it's been touched, it appears on the radar of people who want to steal it for their own ends. Edward discovers that he attracts these people to him as long as he has the rock, but he doesn’t know why, and these events begin to weird him out. Eventually, the Fetch passes through the hands of three of his school-mates: Brigit, Danton, and "Feenix" (Herrick stole my name from a children's book I wrote years ago! I know she did!). The novel is told from several different perspectives, but fortunately not in the obnoxious first person. kudos to Herrick for that.
Danton is a school jock, but he befriends Edward, so he's not the clichéd stereotype you might fear. I had thought his name was 'Denton' from the audio, but it’s not. That's another problem with audio books: we have no idea how the characters spell their names! Feenix is mischievous and likes to get people going, particularly her teachers. She consistently refers to Edward as 'Dweebo'. Some might see her as mean, or even as a bitch, but she's actually insecure and protects herself by means of presenting a thorny exterior. Brigit is the most pointless character. She's almost a mute, which means that the ending will hinge on her voice being found at the right time - no spoiler there - but she really has very little going on for almost the entire novel. It seems a bit unfair on her as a character. It’s just as well that these four touched the Fetch, because as time starts to end, they're the only ones who notice it.
One thing I really liked about Herrick's book is that she delivers on something which is sadly lacking in YA fiction; good, solid, sound science! She offers none to explain how all this fantasy works, but she offers more than sufficient to give you have a handle on what real science says about the why and how of things that are happening in the novel - like dimensions and time, for example. If there were only two dimensions - everything had no height, for example - then you would not see it. It’s not like you could see it from overhead, but not from edge-on: it would quite literally disappear, because it has absolutely no height, not even a nanometer - there is no edge-on view. She argues the same thing for time - like it’s the fourth dimension, and if there is no time, then you can’t see anything, any more than if there was no width or breadth. Things would disappear, and this is indeed what starts to happen as the Time Flies eat all the time.
She screws up here, IMO, because she depicts all this as things aging - both people and buildings. I can see how she derives that (if moments are extracted, then everything ages faster), but this seems at odds with her stated premise that things become invisible when one of the dimensions is missing. It makes a kind of sense, but it seems odd; then most things in advanced physics do! She reverts to the original premise as the story continues, with great gaps of nothingness opening up all over the city in the space-time fabric of the universe. I loved the novel for this. Given the poor state of science and math education in the US, it's shameful that more YA writers don’t do a better job, but then those writers are a product of the same society which turns out people with a lousy understanding of science and math in the first place, so how are they to do better? Vicious cycle! It’s sad though, especially given that so many YA writers are university or college grads. So huge kudos to Herrick for this.
There are, as I've indicated, some plot holes and some problems, but overall, this was a really good novel. You may find yourself struggling through some parts which should have been trimmed severely or edited out altogether, such as Feenix's pointless sojourn with the three witches, and Edward's bizarre disappearance and reappearance at a crucial time in the finale, but there are also joys to be had as one oddball thing after another crops up, and is integrated effortlessly into the story like another piece in a jigsaw
The characters are good, if a bit thinly-sketched. Feenix was my favorite. Brigit seemed like she need not have been there. I liked the interaction of the four, and that they came together as a team whereas before, they weren't even friends. There's no sappy absurd romance here, or love a triangle. They're simply four people - equals, gender checked at the door. This was wonderful. I liked the part where Herrick aged the four of them rapidly, and they got to see each other as grown-ups. I found it inexplicable as they reverted back to their original ages when there seemed to have been nothing to account for the reversion! Plot holes!
Overall, I rate this a very worthy read. Yes, it’s sad that there are some poor parts which you just have to wade through, but the good parts more than made up for that. Overall it’s well worth the time for as interesting, inventive, original, and fun story as this was.
