Saturdays in Books

Epic title.

The premise of this is quite similar to Connie Willis' Oxford Time Travel books, but the plot, characters, tone, basically everything else, is completely different. So rather than make direct comparisons, let's just consider both to be part of the same sub genre of Time Travelling Academics.

I admit, I almost didn't make it out of the first few chapters. The prose felt very rough, and the story itself wasn't grabbing me. Too much slow intro on the premise and too much time spent learning the names of characters who wouldn't make it through training. But as soon as we get to time travel, I had a great time.

Mostly.

I do feel that the second attempted rape was a bit much. Largely because the events leading up to it were just dumb. The first one felt gratuitous, but fit into context. The second was just a shit cherry on top of a melting shit cream sunday of a subplot.

I like the protagonist. I like that the author drops things that look like foreshadowing, but are as likely to be recontextualizations as premonitions. I like the sense of humor a lot. And I'm definitely interested in reading more of these.