Here and Now and Then

The narrator: Audible – if you are reading this…please don\’t just play the first chapter when people are listening to samples. Pick out some dialogue for the sample because that\’s what makes or breaks it. This guy LITERALLY does a falsetto voice when voicing our protagonist\’s first wife. And it\’s not much better when he does the second wife. It was absolutely unbearable. The book: Full disclosure: I have a personal seething hatred for books that repeatedly reference \”training\” the main character has. \”Kin\’s agent training kicked in…\” \”Setting aside all his prior training…\” etc. So, we were off to a rough start from the prologue. But, that\’s a personal issue that you may not have. The protagonist of this story was unsympathetic from the very beginning and just never caught up with me. The notion that a time travel agent would sacrifice the rules of his profession after he gets stranded – not just by forming personal relationships – but by getting married and even propagating! The fact that the other shoe will drop eventually all but writes itself. When Kin Stewart started protesting after his old life caught up with him, I found myself saying out loud, over and over: what did you think was going to happen? Once back in his own time, it\’s not much better. Over and over Kin Stewart breaks the rules and then is downright enraged when faced with the consequences. You\’ll meet his future family (or rather, the family from his own timeline) who is full of forgettable characters: Penny Fernandez who lacks anything resembling a spine, Marcus Fernandez who is, apparently, a robot, and the Fernandez would-be parents in law. These guys are just…d*cks. This came very highly recommended from lots of close friends and I really wanted to like this one. But, it just fell flat all around.

Although I normally listen to bios, history and science I ventured into fiction with a particular fondness for time travel sci-fi. I was not disappointed. This story pulls you along with intriguing characters, excellent plot and relatively plausible science. I found it very enjoyable and would highly recommend Mike Chen\’s book if you like this genre. I would add that the narrator has a great voice but as some others have criticized, his deep voice does not deliver credibility for relating to women characters. I would not mention this except narrators like Roberto Scarlato move between multiple female and male characters seamlessly and convincingly. Cary Hite isn\’t bad. he has a great radio voice but it was a minor distraction when he moved to the female voice. However, I highly recommend this book. It delivers surprisingly plot twists and compelling characters and story. Check it out!

★★½ stars, rounded up for the effort I really wish I could give this novel a better rating, but it just didn\’t make the greatness cut for me. It had this awful and stilted translated-from-another-language feel, all the way through. Everything was worded accurately, but hardly ever appropriately, more like a graphic novel than an actual words-only book. The text was littered with short sentence fragments, appearing just as often as actual sentences. I felt like I was reading the novel version of Joey\’s recommendation letter for Monica and Chandler to adopt a child. \”His heart had sprinted at the mere notion for minutes now.\” See what I mean? It\’s just off somehow. Plus, in Audible, the narrator did the audio version no favors. He read with the weirdest cadence, like he couldn\’t figure out how to make heads or tails of the writing either! On a brighter note, I got to test out just how fast I could crank up the playback speed in my Audible app before I had trouble keeping up. (Apparently my max is 1.20% and then I\’m approaching seizure territory.) So, my take: two and a half stars for a semi-original adventure idea turned into a fun little romp through time with no unnecessary violence, sex, or foul language. It was simply a nice story that kinda needed an editor to stop the stilted insanity and give this baby some flow.

Started off a little confusing just figuring out who was who and what was going on, but then I got drawn into the characters and couldn\’t put it down. I had a little trouble with the performance – some characters were voiced very well, but I found the voicing of female characters just so so. They all sounded the same. Wasn\’t bad, just not the best. But the story line made up for it. Very well written novel, Also nice to have a satisfying conclusion – so many books are trilogies so when I find a fabulous stand-alone novel with all the loose ends tied up nicely, it\’s refreshing. Highly recommended.

I enjoyed this time travel adventure, which is quite different from most books in the genre. This one involves people caught between two lives lives a century apart that seemed impossible to merge, yet the author did just that. The story had interesting and complex characters and an extremely satisfying conclusion. What more can you ask?

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