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Title: A Shortcut in Time by Charles Dickinson ISBN: 0-7653-0639-5 Publisher: Forge Pub. Date: 17 January, 2004 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.95 (20 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Be careful where you run in the rain . . .
Comment: There are basically two kinds of time travel stories. There's the Sprague DeCamp/Robert Silverberg kind of story, full of large, historymaking events, and the Time Patrol to protect the continuum, and knowledgeable time travelers making things happen. And there's the Jack Finney kind of story, about ordinary people dealing with small-scale events in out-of-the-way towns and trying hard simply to cope with things that happen to them willy-nilly. Dickinson has written a warm, funny, affecting example of the second kind of story. Josh Winkler is a somewhat feckless artist living in Euclid Heights, Illinois, where crosswise shortcut paths known as "perp walks" disturb the town's gridded layout. He's married to a doctor, the sister of his brother Kurt's best friend when they were kids, before her brother drowned in the town pool and Kurt suffered permanent brain damage. Their fifteen-year-old daughter, Penny -- the best-drawn character in the book, I think -- is about all that's still keeping them together. Then Josh gets caught riding his bike in a storm on one of the perp walks and is tossed fifteen minutes into the past. But young Constance, who appears soon after, has a worse time of it, dragged into our own era from 1908. Can she get back? Can she adapt to our world? And what happens if someone else becomes an unintentional time traveler? Dickinson's style is quiet and thoughtful; he almost lets the story tell itself. An excellent piece of work.
Rating: 2
Summary: A shortcut in plot?
Comment: The author definitely had some fun with the concept of time travel and created a fast-paced and entertaining story, which didn't get bogged down in concerns over the intracacies of time travel and its paradoxes or explanations as to how the the characters were able to skip so freely through time. However, I agree with many of the other reviewers that the ending was absolutely inexcusable. I've never encountered such a sudden and abrupt ending. I had to track down another copy of the book to ensure that I wasn't just missing pages. I can only assume that the author simply fell through a time hole himself and wasn't around the finish the book. The characters are left hanging without any resolution or explanation. While I appreciate that not every story has a happy ending, at a minimum, I expected an ending of some sort. Readers of this book will definitely feel cheated at the "conclusion".
Rating: 1
Summary: Nothing Like Killing a Decent Conceit with a Terrible Ending
Comment: I am really intrigued by this concept, and I must say that after the midpoint of the book, I was taking longer lunch breaks just to finish it.
But.
The first half really dragged for having such an interesting idea, they never REALLY explain how they are sometimes able to directly influence what time they end up in, and it just seemed like a lot of slogging.
Worse still, the ending is both disappointingly grim AND decidedly abrupt. I kept thinking that perhaps some pages were missng form the book becuase it just ended.
I wanted to like this book. I know the suburbs he talks about and lives in, and I enjoy a good time travel book. But the ending was inexcusable. I've never been more upset after finishing a novel.
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Title: The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold, Geoffrey Klempner ISBN: 1932100040 Publisher: BenBella Books Pub. Date: 01 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Time Stand Still: A Darren Camponi Novel by John Misak ISBN: 1931402183 Publisher: Barclay Books, LLC Pub. Date: 01 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: The Mirror by Marlys Millhiser, Jerry Cleveland ISBN: 0915230151 Publisher: Rue Morgue Pub. Date: November, 1997 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Past Imperfect by Martin Harry Greenberg, Larry Segriff ISBN: 0756400120 Publisher: DAW Books Pub. Date: 10 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: Replay by Ken Grimwood ISBN: 068816112X Publisher: William Morrow Pub. Date: 05 August, 1998 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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