Today’s stack involves characters moving through time in unusual ways—some of it is time travel, but not all of the stories can be easily categorized that way. There are also some interesting overlaps between some of the books, too, and with some of the TV shows and movies I’ve seen recently. More on that at the end.
All This & More by Peng Shepherd
I’ll begin today’s column by revisiting this one, which I mentioned before when I had just started reading it. The book is about a reality TV show called All This & More that uses a quantum bubbling technology to allow the show’s star to revisit crucial moments in their past and make different decisions, fine-tuning their life until it is just perfect. Marsh is a 45-year-old legal assistant with a teenage daughter and her marriage has just come apart because she caught her husband Dylan cheating. But what if she had made different choices in the past? Maybe she pushed to get her law degree, while Dylan took more responsibility caring for Harper when she was young. Or perhaps she managed to reconnect with Ren, an old high school crush, after things went sour with Dylan. The show offers her the opportunity to try all this … and more.
The book is set up like a choose-your-own-adventure book, though with much longer sections before choices than the books I read as a kid. The chapters are set up as episodes of the show, and each episode can jump Marsh to a different time in her life—they don’t necessarily play out in chronological order, and you don’t always make choices between each episode, either. I did go back and re-read with different choices just to see how things played out, and ultimately you get to one of two different endings, but there are several ways to get there.
One of the themes in the book is Marsh’s relationship with Harper: in her original timeline she is very close with Harper, but there are some in which she finds that Harper is more distant, or seems shy around her. As she progresses through the show, she continues to find ways to make things better for both herself and for Harper, giving her daughter more and more success in her musical career. Another big theme is the idea of control. At the start of the book, Marsh can hardly believe that she can make these big changes and the show’s host works hard to give her the confidence to try things out; later, Marsh gets comfortable calling the shots, asking for re-dos if she doesn’t like the way somebody was standing, or maybe if she felt like the walls should have been a different color. If we could change anything about our lives, how much would we obsess over all the little details? When we’ve been told that we could have the “perfect” life, what wouldn’t we change to pursue that ideal?
On top of that, though, there’s also a bigger mystery, which I alluded to in my previous column. Marsh notices some weird things happening, like the fact that sometimes Dylan remembered things from previous iterations of their life that should have been overwritten. And there’s the fact that the word “chrysalis” keeps popping up over and over—is it following her throughout all these different versions of her life? What does it mean? I enjoyed trying to figure out this mystery as much as I enjoyed reading about Marsh’s exploration of all the various possibilities for her life.
You Cannot Mess This Up by Amy Weinland Daughters
This one is a little hard to categorize: it’s fiction, but with the subtitle “A True Story That Never Happened.” It’s sort of a time-travel novel, but it’s also kind of a memoir. Amy is also a forty-something mother, on her way to visit her dad and siblings on Thanksgiving weekend so they can do the difficult work of estate planning, and catches a ride on a small plane with an acquaintance who happens to be flying to Houston that weekend. She wakes up when they land, only to discover that things have changed: she and Mary are now dressed in ’70s fashion, and on the drive to her childhood home Mary gives her some weird instructions, including the titular “You cannot mess this up.”
Amy then arrives at her childhood home and meets her own family—parents, two siblings, and a 10-year-old version of herself—and is introduced as a “distant cousin” who happened to be in town. She ends up spending Thanksgiving and the next day, interacting with her family—including both sets of grandparents—and taking copious notes about things to Google when she gets back to her own time.
The main theme of the book is about looking back at herself and her family from an adult perspective. Amy was an awkward middle child, and as an adult she is a little torn between loving this kid version of herself and being incredibly annoyed by her. She gets a different perspective of who her parents and grandparents were, and sees how the sibling dynamics have carried into how she interacts with her siblings as adults. Her relationship with her mother seems like it was always a bit strained, but in this time-travel visit she also starts to understand how some of that stemmed from the way her own mother was treated by her grandmother.
There’s also a lot that’s just about the contrast between 2014 and 1978: the cars, the fashion, the TV shows, the lack of internet, the prevalence of chest hair, and so on. In her own life in 2014, she has had to defend her choice to be a stay-at-home mom who does freelance sports writing; here in 1978, she has to play the role of a working mother who’s traveling without her kids at Thanksgiving, a situation that earns her a lot of weird looks and comments. If you grew up in the ’70s, big chunks of this book may trigger some nostalgia: sunken living rooms and shag carpet, giant television cabinets with no remote control, and so on.
I found some parts of the book intriguing and Daughters has a distinctive voice that is often funny, but there was also a lot that felt like it didn’t add too much to the book. Amy spends a lot of time just remarking on how strange it was to be back in 1978, or fixating on things like the way men’s clothing at the time accentuates their crotch bulges. In one scene when she goes outside in the evening, one of the neighbors assaults her and she barely gets away—and it’s not entirely clear what that scene is intended to tell us. Ultimately it felt like the book was largely Daughters’ way of processing a lot of her own feelings and thoughts about family, so the book is very personal but sometimes lost me a bit. As she tells it, her family was not one to really talk through things out loud, and this book came about after a long overdue conversation with her mother in 2016.
Often, time travel to the past is about making changes: trying to make the present better, or fixing past mistakes. This story felt more like a chance to go back and observe; it wasn’t so much an opportunity to change things so much as a way for Amy to gain a better understanding of herself.
The 23rd Hero by Rebecca Anne Nguyen
Sloane Burrows has a photographic memory, but using it brings her shame, largely because of the way her father treated her as a freak for it. So even though she’s capable of much more complex tasks, she’s working as a booth repair tech for the Program. The Program is a powerful agency that has been attempting to fix man-made climate change … using time travel. Everything about the Program is shrouded in mystery, from its founder to how the technology works to how Heroes are chosen. There are booths all over the world where people can apply to be a Hero: trained to go back in time and make changes to history that will have huge impacts on the environment.
There’s a certain amount of hand-waviness to the time travel (as there usually is), but I did appreciate some of the details. Most of the missions are lifelong tasks: for the Heroes, it’s a one-way trip where they will spend the rest of their lives trying to change specific things. But in the present, changes take place instantaneously, so the Program sends out teams to help people adjust to the new reality. Some buildings may pop out of existence; shorelines may change; entire types of technology could vanish. Before the time portal opens (a day unironically referred to as P-Day), people in areas likely to be affected are instructed to be on ground level because you don’t want to be on an upper story if that building no longer exists. (Nothing is said about the possibility of entire family tree branches being swept away, though I’d imagine making changes as sweeping as eliminating petroleum products would also have an impact on who even survives to the present.)
As you may have guessed from the title, Sloane does get selected to be the 23rd Hero, and her mission is designed around her memory: she’ll go back to sixteenth-century France and pass herself off as a soothsayer, eventually working to become King Francis’s Royal Astrologer in the hopes of delaying French colonization of the Americas. But what the Program didn’t count on was the way Sloane gets unbearably nauseated any time she tries to use her memory in public. She’s still trying to win her dad’s approval, and being chosen as the Hero has only made things worse because she has been thrust into the spotlight.
There are further complications: Sloane finally meets the man of her (literal) dreams at the Program. She doesn’t know why she’s been having recurring dreams of Bastian for years before they even met, but things get pretty passionate between them in the short time she has to train for her mission, and they both know that their time together is limited. If she goes back to save the world, they’ll be forever separated by time.
The 23rd Hero had an intriguing premise but it felt sometimes like it had too many ideas to fit into one book. Sloane’s memory and her issues with her dad are a constant theme through the book, and I mostly found it frustrating how hard she pushed herself to win his approval when it really didn’t feel like there was anything redeeming about him at all. We do eventually get some answers of a sort about the Program and how the time travel technology works, and it seemed oddly religious, as does Sloane’s own approach to her mission when things go a bit awry upon arrival. And though I know stories often involve thinking fast when the plan goes south, it surprised me how little of the original mission plan is actually used in the end—in fact, Sloane’s memory that took up so much space in the first half of the book feels barely used by the end. It does feel like it’s primarily there for what it represents for Sloane and her father, a source of the self-doubt that she has to overcome in order to become the Hero.
Ultimately, there is an important message in The 23rd Hero about the environment: there is no magical time travel solution for us to fix the past but there are actions we need to take now to prevent the disastrous future envisioned in the book. But if you want to take a bit of a time-travel love story adventure to think about it, you can have a bit of fun with this book.
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
Coincidentally, this time travel story also has a protagonist who is a mixed-race white-Cambodian woman with a slow-burn love story, but that’s about the extent of the overlap. Our unnamed narrator has worked as a translator for the UK’s Ministry of Defense, but finally gets a breakthrough to be a field agent for what turns out to be the Ministry of Time, though of course everyone has a cover story because even its existence is top secret. If you thought the time travel in The 23rd Hero was hand-wavy, this one gets even less detailed (at least at the beginning of the book): Adela shrugged. “We have time-travel,” she said, like someone describing the coffee machine. “Welcome to the Ministry.” And as the narrator says: “don’t worry about it.”
So the British government somehow has time travel. What do they do with it? Well, they want to figure out what it does to the human body: what if people can’t survive in a different time? So they’ve extracted various figures from previous centuries, calling them “expats,” and have assigned each one an agent known as a “bridge” who is supposed to help them adjust to the present, as well as monitor them constantly. All of the expats were people who would have died anyway—from wars, disasters, disease—so that it would theoretically have the least impact on the current timeline. (That reminded me of Time Salvager, where the travelers harvested resources from the past just moments before they would have been destroyed.)
Our narrator is assigned to Commander Graham Gore, one of the many men who perished in Captain Franklin’s lost Arctic expedition in 1847. Other expats—often referred to by the year they came from—include a soldier from 1916 who thinks he’s been captured by the enemy and a woman from 1665 who thinks she has died of the bubonic plague and is in some sort of purgatory. The bridges are responsible for teaching them about modern life: how to use a phone or computer, how to get around modern London (though they aren’t supposed to go many places at first), catching them up on history—which would have been the future for the expats. They have to relearn social mores: Graham is scandalized to be living in a house with an unmarried woman, but Maggie (from 1665) is exhilarated by the freedom she has compared to her own timeline. There are sometimes accidental reveals: referring to the “First World War” makes Graham’s ears perk up, leading to awkward explanations before the Wellness team has deemed them ready.
Despite all the awkwardness, though, Graham and his bridge do fall in love with each other, though it’s not entirely clear why the Ministry doesn’t seem to care—wouldn’t there be rules about fraternizing with your charge? And while the bridges are supposed to spend a year helping their expats acclimatize to the twenty-first century, their assignments seem somewhat vague and the Ministry’s real aims are still largely unknown. It’s not until people start dying that our narrator realizes that there are some shenanigans, and she has to decide how she’s going to be involved.
The Ministry of Time alternates between the present-day story, narrated by the bridge, and chapters set during the Arctic expedition before Graham was extracted, told from a third-person perspective. The expedition was real, as was Graham Gore, though of course the author took some creative license in telling his story in the past, and then imagined what he would be like if transported to the present. I really enjoyed his character—as seen from the bridge’s point of view—as he fumbles around initially but eventually starts to figure out how to get along in the modern day.
The narrator, on the other hand, is a bit of an oddity: even though she’s the one telling the story, she isn’t always a sympathetic character. She is ambitious, choosing to align herself with the Ministry even when she begins to have suspicions that maybe they’re up to something—she would just rather not see. Even as she falls in love with Graham, she continues hiding information from him. She’s a fascinating but also infuriating character.
The ending was not what I expected, and I say this as somebody who has read a lot of time travel stories. There were some pieces that I managed to assemble before they were revealed (I mean, I don’t think they were intended to be that well-hidden) but the book manages to steer clear of a typical Hollywood ending and instead gives you something to ponder—both in terms of the time-travel twists and in how the characters develop.
The Leap Year Gene of Kit McKinley by Shelley Wood
This last book is one that I’m still reading now, and although it doesn’t involve time travel, it’s about a girl who travels through time a bit differently than the rest of us. Kit McKinley, born in Canada on Leap Day in 1916, ages at a quarter of the usual speed, growing about a year’s worth in four years. We see her story as it intertwines with various people throughout her life. Her mother, a biologist, struggles to find an explanation for this in her genetics research. Her father was killed in World War I before she was born, and his older brother eventually becomes her adoptive father—his work as as diplomat takes the young family to Europe, where they find themselves in Paris and then Berlin in the lead-up to World War II. Conveniently, their constant moves allow them to reintroduce Kit each time, adjusting her stated age to correspond to her appearance.
Even though she is physically smaller, her mind is somewhere in between her appearance and her actual age, so she seems precocious. When the couple have another daughter, things get even more complicated as Helen soon looks like she could be a twin, and will soon look like the older sister, even though Kit has already experienced over two decades of life.
A lot of the story’s focus so far is on various eugenics-related movements. In Canada, some of the leaders of the women’s suffrage movement also rail against “degenerates,” and Kit’s small stature makes her suspect as a war baby because she looks much too young. Later, in Berlin, the family finds themselves watched by Nazi scientists who want to weed society of anything they deem impure or undesirable. Kit’s parents struggle to keep her secret hidden, especially from those who may take steps to harm her. I’m not sure where the story will go next, but the prologue is set in 2016, so we’ve still got over half a century to go.
The first two books in today’s list, All This & More and You Cannot Mess This Up, both involve a theme of parenting vs. career. It takes Marsh a few tries to figure out how to set up her life so that she can have an amazing career and a close relationship with her kids. Amy mentions that she sometimes has to defend her decision to be a stay-at-home mother in a time when that feels like setting career advancement aside. The last in the list, The Leap Year Gene of Kit McKinley, also touches on this in the section focusing on Lillian, Kit’s mother. Ernest, the husband, doesn’t understand why she seems so focused on her work and doesn’t dote on the kids, assuming that she doesn’t feel the same sort of love toward them, but when we get more of her perspective we see that her pursuit of answers is tied to how she loves Kit, and there are also indications that she has anxiety or another condition that affects the way she is able to express herself to them.
I appreciated in particular this last portrayal, because earlier in the book it felt like the book might be taking the common stance that those who put their careers first are missing out, that family is always more rewarding. That’s a message that I feel like I see quite often, particularly in movies. I’ve been watching the Dark Matter TV series recently, another show about moving through time in weird ways. It’s based on a book by Blake Crouch (Robin Brooks covered it here, I covered it here), about a guy who builds a quantum box that allows him to step into other possible universes; the version of Jason who gave up a relationship to pursue his research built the box, and then jumped into the world of the Jason who gave up his research to raise a child instead and takes over his life. The message in both the book and the TV series is pretty clear: career Jason is a terrible person who thinks he can have everything, and family Jason is a decent man who isn’t tempted by the fame and success of the other timeline and just wants to get back to his family.
Another instance came up just last night, when I watched The Family Plan with my kids. It stars Mark Wahlberg as a former covert assassin who left that life and became a suburban dad, but now his old colleagues have finally tracked him down and are out to kill him. He’s fighting off assassins while trying to keep his old life a secret from his family. Obviously this isn’t just a regular career, but the movie does have him explicitly talking about being a dad vs. the successful career that he gave up. In parallel, the mom (played by Michelle Monaghan) eventually runs into a woman who gives her own evil villain speech contrasting raising brats and taking down dictators, and it’s a pretty heavy-handed statement about which is actually the better choice. The woman with no kids is literally a villain her. In a week where childless women have been a focus of political discourse, it really struck me how much we’ve bought into these stories and often devalue people who don’t have kids, whether by choice or not.
As a stay-at-home dad, obviously I made the choice myself to take this path rather than pursue some high-paying career, I also recognize that I can do this because my wife is a family doctor and earns enough to support a family. Likewise, she made the choice to become a doctor, a time-consuming career that means she has relied on me to take care of the kids. We’ve managed to make it work, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t sometimes wonder what things might have been like otherwise. What if she’d had more time with the kids when they were younger? What if I had kept my job as a covert assassin? (Okay, not really.) Either way, one of the things I took away from All This & More is that you live the life you have, and while it doesn’t mean you can’t make changes, the ability to magically make changes to anything and everything is probably too much power for most of us.
My Current Reads
Okay, on to my current reads! One of the things I’ve been enjoying isn’t exactly a book. It’s Vera Brosgol’s Rat Cruise newsletter. Vera Brosgol has illustrated many comics and picture books that I’ve enjoyed (including Plain Jane and the Mermaid, her most recent). She was accepted for an artist residency program with the Forest Service, and is now on a 20-day project in Alaska, tagging along with a team of researchers who are surveying islands for invasive species like crabs and rats. She’s writing a newsletter about the trip with photos and drawings, and it’s been great. Go have a look!
I’ve also been reading a few comics, though one of the books I read recently prompted a journey down the internet rabbit-hole of figuring out why some people think the artist is an awful person, so … at this point I’m not sure if I’ll be covering that book after all.
After this current batch of time-travel-adjacent stories, I may dive into a stack of books (both non-fiction and fiction) about a current hot topic: artificial intelligence. I’ve got some sci-fi, a comic book, and even a book of poetry that digs into it. It’ll probably take me a few weeks at least, but keep an eye out for that down the road.
Disclosure: I received review copies of the books highlighted in today’s column. Affiliate links to Bookshop.org help support my writing while sending your money to independent booksellers!
