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[starreview]
Classification: Personal Alternate Reality
One day, Josh Winkler, an artist residing in the small town of Euclid Heights, Illinois, discovers by accident that one particular shortcut takes him 15 minutes into the past. Soon the entire town talks about him. He becomes the local joke and his Wife’s practice (she’s a doctor) suffers.
Not much later, Constance Morceau, a 15 year old who claims to be from the year 1908, appears in town and has no idea how to get back to her time. Things becomes even more complicated when Josh’s 15 year old daughter, Penny, vanishes. By going through microfilm in the library, he discovers she accidentally traveled to the year 1918 and had died there.
Determined to rescue his daughter, Josh successfully travels to the year 1918 by finding the right shortcut. Once he returns to the present, he discovers that his life has dramatically changed. He realizes the only way to fix it would be to go back in once time again and set things right.
Like many other time travel novels, A Shortcut in Time attempts to examine how our life is affected by seemingly small choices – how a small change may have great repercussions. Although the topic is handled quite well, and the book had some good writing, I thought it was boring, even tiresome. Particularly towards the second part of the book, reading it felt like a chore: the subplot of Constance could have been omitted and the book would’ve suffered no loss. All in all, there wasn’t anything particularly bad about the novel or the writing (unlike other books I’ve reviewed here) – but there were few positives as well.
As a side note, I know some people have criticized the novel’s choice of time travel mechanism, i.e. finding the right ‘shortcut’ in a small town can take people to other periods in time. Even though I agree that this is a silly mode of transportation, I don’t particularly mind it. In my opinion, this is a perfect example where suspension of disbelief is required.
In summary, this is a generally weak and unmemorable novel. I’d recommend it only to people who must get their hands on every time travel story. If I recall correctly, this is actually the novel the made me decide to be more selective with my choices of time travel novels. Until this point I literally read everything I was able to obtain. No more: there are too many novels, and we have to be selective.
Link to the book’s details on Amazon.com
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