Simone and Her Books

I’m a huge fan of time travel stories. Ever since I was a kid and I read The Time Machine by H.G. Wells for the first time, I was in love with this idea of traveling to the future or the past. Over time, my love of the genre continued to grow and I love exploring all concepts of portal jumping, time distortion, parallel universes. It’s definitely an interesting concept for me and when I heard that Philip Fracassi wrote a time traveling thriller, I knew I had to check it out.

The story follows Beth, a scientist who had just recently discovered time travel with her husband. Through a wormhole in space and time, human consciousness is able to jump back in time for 90 seconds to a moment in their personal memories. You can relive some of the most important moments of your life, good or bad. For Beth, it seems pretty bad since the first memory you see her jump to is the one where she watches her whole family die in a plane crash. You can tell the tone of the book from that single moment.

However, after her husband’s sudden death and the company she works for looking to make money off her invention, Beth is spiraling. It also doesn’t help that she sees her husband appear randomly throughout the day. Looking to solve some of the bigger questions of her invention (how the machine choose which memory to visit), she makes herself a guinea pig stepping through the wormhole more times than necessary only discover one day that she’s somehow altered the existence of someone close to her.

I feel like with Philip Fracassi, his strongest writing is his characters. I remember in my reading of Boys in the Valley, the emotional bond you create with his characters most definitely moves you through the story hoping that everything turns out alright for them. Beth is at this weird place in her life where she’s juggling too many things at once and not only do you feel that for her, but you also see how much she wants to be a good mom, a great scientist, and a good friend. You really feel for Beth who is struggling with the mechanics of her time machine, grieving the loss of her husband, and also being a mom to a young daughter she treasures. It felt very real despite the story being completely fictional.

As much as I loved the story and especially the main character, Beth, I just couldn’t get over the science. And I feel a little bad about it because Philip Fracassi was good enough to thank the scientists and experts he spoke with to make the science make sense. For the most part, it was interesting. The idea of your consciousness traveling through a wormhole through space and time to your memories is quite an intriguing concept. However, it was hard to wrap my mind around your consciousness traveling rather than your entire body. I wondered about subjective perspectives, memories being misremembered, etc. It wasn’t the strongest hard science story I’ve read and much preferred the elusive concepts in a book like Before the Coffee Gets Cold, which has a similar rule system when it comes to time travel.

Overall, this is an interesting science fiction story with tons of potential. I just wish the science made a bit more sense, especially since it plays such a huge factor in the book. Again, I feel pretty bad about this knowing how much research he did to make it make sense, but I think for Philip Fracassi, it was more about the characters who drive his stories.

Thanks to Orbit Books for a gifted copy of this book.