Canterbury Sales says:

I have to say that lately I have been very suspicious of the $0.99 Kindle books. So many of them where thinly disguised attempts at Cristian propaganda masquerading as a thriller that now I read the first few pages and only continue reading if the main character does not profess his/her religious beliefs.

In this case, thankfully that didn’t happen.

So I kept on reading and at the beginning it was not easy for me to get in the swing of things. I am not sure if the reader is told what year the book starts in, but it seems to me it is a not too far future. Maybe even present time. An actress sold her face for money and her long suffering admirer builds a machine to go back in time and spare her that terrible fate.

This is the only point in the story where I have to stop and consider if something like that would conceivably really happen. Naturally, we are talking about time travel so some suspension of disbelief is necessary no matter what. But strangely I find this “selling one’s face for money” scheme the hardest to believe. I don’t care how down on her luck someone is. Or how much some ugly woman would like to have someone else’s face. I have actually been through an organ transplant myself a few years back and there isn’t enough money that would make me want to repeat the experience. A face transplant would carry very similar pain and suffering and it would always make someone look like a freak. Both donor and recipient.

While a face transplant sounds futuristic and disgusting enough, as the trigger for the protagonist traveling to the past to set things right something like dieing in a accident or being killed by a spouse would probably have worked just as well.

Once we get away from the premise though, the book takes off. The writing style is both direct and at time lyrical. The author can write about surroundings and emotions in a very descriptive manner that is often very pleasant. Sometimes doesn’t quite work, but this is a your author that no doubt will fine tune his mastery of the craft.

The concept of time travel and the explanations of the paradoxes is very clever. Character development is almost always excellent. Some of the characters are a times a bit shallow but some are also very well fleshed out.

About the middle of the book there is a key event in the story that also I found less than convincing, but I cannot go too much in detail about it at the risk o spoiling the plot. Lets just say that the rage and obsession of one of the main characters, whom eventually blows up in a fireball, is not 100% believable. I wish I could go into more detail. Let’s just say that the reaction of that character was a bit excessive in my opinion. Likewise, one of the female heroines falls in love, and manages from then on to trust blindly, with one of the male counterparts a bit too fast. A few more pages there would have made it a bit more believable.

But I am really nitpicking here. All in all it was a very enjoyable read, a nice throwback to the old fashion time travel stories with some modern twists that nicely update the plot for our times.

The science is very light, but that’s completely understandable. Better to keep that vague since no one at the moment could really explain what it takes to travel in time. I would guess that some sort of smart phone would not be the most likely device to accomplish it, but neither is a “Go Cart with an umbrella” as another reviewer characterized H.G.Wells movie treatment of the “Time Machine”.

Toward the end there is a well crafted plot point that I didn’t see coming (while I certainly wondered what the disconnected parallel narration was all about and I knew something was in store). I think here too a few more pages would have improved the story

I enjoyed this book and I would read a (full price) sequel if it was ever written. Mr. Aleman is a talented writer that I suspect will only get better at his craft. I would recommend this book

Rating: 4 / 5

Elimatta says:

I like the idea of time travel stories – for which I thank David Tennant and Dr Who – but unlike other reviewers, I found the prose distracting. The metaphors, similes and images felt forced. This felt like an unsuccessful attempt to turn a thriller into literature.
Rating: 2 / 5