An innovative time-travel tale in which the main characters don’t actually visit the past or the future.
Eight elite brothers and sisters try to survive the regular upheavals caused by reckless time traveling.
Huston’s debut novel, starting a new sci-fi series (planned as 10 books), delivers a clever time-travel conceit. It involves the consequences of time travel (immortalized in Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder”): reality in the “present” shifts due to temporal meddling in the past. After time travel becomes feasible, the U.S. has a new metropolis—Shawneetown, Illinois, evidently displacing Chicago, created through engineering by entrepreneurial voyagers. But for the Vann family of Shawneetown, life means periodic, bewildering paradigm shifts, as new waves of reality hit one after another, sending the clan scrambling to dimensional “Safe Houses.” The Vanns never know whether former careers, relationships, or even their personalities still exist. At least they are semi-protected; most people are oblivious “Bystanders,” erased or created whenever another human-caused Timestorm arrives. To the time-travel insiders, Bystanders are as inconsequential as Harry Potter’s muggles. The narrative (which is epistolary, journal entries via some form of recording device) reflects the point of view of young, uncertain Dexter Vann, an aspiring engineer warned not to count on finishing college by oldest brother Amos (an elite in the enigmatic time-travel governing body). Every few chapters, a new reality (“Season”) dawns. Some Seasons are harsh and weird; others are pleasant. But with Time Changes happening 250 times already, Dexter suffers a bad case of existential dread, turning very personal when he emerges into a reality in which his “Alternate Self” possessed a girlfriend he has never actually met. The tale is somewhat hobbled plotwise by its premise. The challenge here is advancing a storyline that resets itself on a regular basis. Huston manages some momentum, partially thanks to the recurring menace of a vengeful time “Void Pirate” but mainly through reliable inventiveness. There’s a newspaper—actually an “Oldspaper”—for the time-travel clique; time-related neuroses that surface to varying degrees in Dexter’s older and younger siblings (a glossary is included); and the protagonist’s own inconsistent voice. It’s difficult enough to find an identity as a youth; it’s much harder with reality routinely rewritten. Underlying the wit, wonder, and surprises is a theme of family bonds holding characters together despite the whole Chronoverse going crazy. The material is attuned to both YA and adult sensibilities.
An innovative time-travel tale in which the main characters don’t actually visit the past or the future.Pub Date: March 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-946090-00-3
Page Count: 402
Publisher: Chronoversal Export
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy,...
Britisher Haddon debuts in the adult novel with the bittersweet tale of a 15-year-old autistic who’s also a math genius.
Christopher Boone has had some bad knocks: his mother has died (well, she went to the hospital and never came back), and soon after he found a neighbor’s dog on the front lawn, slain by a garden fork stuck through it. A teacher said that he should write something that he “would like to read himself”—and so he embarks on this book, a murder mystery that will reveal who killed Mrs. Shears’s dog. First off, though, is a night in jail for hitting the policeman who questions him about the dog (the cop made the mistake of grabbing the boy by the arm when he can’t stand to be touched—any more than he can stand the colors yellow or brown, or not knowing what’s going to happen next). Christopher’s father bails him out but forbids his doing any more “detecting” about the dog-murder. When Christopher disobeys (and writes about it in his book), a fight ensues and his father confiscates the book. In time, detective-Christopher finds it, along with certain other clues that reveal a very great deal indeed about his mother’s “death,” his father’s own part in it—and the murder of the dog. Calming himself by doing roots, cubes, prime numbers, and math problems in his head, Christopher runs away, braves a train-ride to London, and finds—his mother. How can this be? Read and see. Neither parent, if truth be told, is the least bit prepossessing or more than a cutout. Christopher, though, with pet rat Toby in his pocket and advanced “maths” in his head, is another matter indeed, and readers will cheer when, way precociously, he takes his A-level maths and does brilliantly.
A kind of Holden Caulfield who speaks bravely and winningly from inside the sorrows of autism: wonderful, simple, easy, moving, and likely to be a smash.Pub Date: June 17, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50945-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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