Rating: WARTY!
I made it almost 40% through this before giving up. The stupid is great with this one. There was no time travel at all in the portion I read so I didn't get the fixation with it on the book cover. There was increasing talk about it when I quit, but nothing happening at all.
It seems to me if you're going to emblazon your book cover with something, then you really need to deliver on it somewhere quite early on in the novel even if only a tease. If it's all tease and no delivery, then you're just blue-balling your reader. So, if there's one type of story above all others I hate, and it's not the one that has an endless lead-in with little or no payoff, then it's the one where there's a stupid female main character. It's worse if she's given to piercing bouts of screaming, so I was glad at least, that this was not a problem here.
Usually the stupid women are found in YA novels, but not exclusively so. A disturbing number of those are written by women too, but in this story, the main protagonist is a writer who is in her late thirties - hardly YA. Her ridiculous name is Helen Weils. The equally ridiculous name of her co-protagonist is Chip Sledd. The book should have been titled "Kitchen Sink" because the author tries to jam every ridiculous conspiracy theory into his purported time-travel nonsense, whether it fits or not, and let's face it, which conspiracy theory isn't ridiculous in the extreme?
The problem was that it was boring, hence my DNF-ing it. You could make a story like this one work - the conspiracy guy and the skeptical woman (it's X-Files rip-off after all) - but you'd have to do a lot better job than this author did. It would help immensely if you didn't make both of these characters dumb and unappealing.
The problem is that they are profoundly stupid and have no saving graces. Sledd claims he's been avoiding the Men in Black (yes, they're in it, too) for years, yet for the first forty percent of the book I listened to, these two are quite literally constantly on the run from those guys, unable to avoid them because Sledd led them right to his meeting with Weils! It's moronic, and tedious rather than smart and gripping.
Weils is a writer of fiction, which is what attracted Sledd to her, because she'd been researching a book on the Roanoke colonists who disappeared. Yes, they're in it too. Could the author not find a new original mystery to go with? He has to drag out every trope and cliché he can find? For someone who is supposed to be an author who researches and writes great stories, Weils is appallingly slow to grasp what she's being told and worse, she's completely passive - at least in that numbing forty percent I experienced. She's acted on, She is not an actor. It's annoying.
The sad frosting on the sunken cake of this novel is that the plot behaves like there's no Internet and no media, such that these guys could go and blab the whole story and end the problem! Of course that would end the novel, but for an author to fail to even address that as an option purely for the purpose of somehow ruling it out is just poor writing.
He seems to think that just because his characters can't go to the police (the Men in Black would simply extract them on some farcical pretense, presumably) then there are literally no options available to them other than to keep running. So Sledd is responsible for dragging Weils into all this, yet not once is she pissed-off with him for upending her life. It's completely inauthentic. And he doesn't even really apologize for what he's done to her, but the problem here is that he somehow thinks she can help him expose the conspiracy! Why her? Why not the Internet or a well-known investigative reporter in the media? It makes no sense.
The other question is what, precisely, do the Men in Black want with Weils and Sledd? What, exactly, would they do with them if they caught them? If the men in Black have the smarts and technology they're purported to have, they would know that she knows nothing, so why are they remotely interested in her? Why push her into Sledd's camp by clamping down on him right then? It makes no sense, and I call bullshit on these amateur theatrics. I ditched the book and cannot commend it.
