Time Travel & T-Rexs

I’ve been struggling to get into Book 6 of The Expanse (sorry guys, but it’s just dragging for me…) and so was in a reading rut. Then I found this on my kindle having picked it up for 99p earlier this year and less than 6 hours later I’d finished the whole damned thing! So thank you Jodi Taylor for writing a fun, fast-paced, romp of a novel that had me turning pages like crazy (even during a boring conference call at work).

The book is the first in a series called The Chronicles of St Mary’s which is set in a research institute (basically a boarding school for slightly crazy grown-ups) where our dramatis personae get to visit historic events and document them for their parent university. They’re very insistent it’s not time travel but it totally is, and the way they got the time machines is very much a paradox that we shouldn’t talk about. Our route into this world is Madeleine Maxwell (Max) who gets recruited when her life is going nowhere after university. We see through her eyes the training needed to become a Historian (time traveller) and get to join her on adventures which inevitably go horribly wrong. Yes, there is a T-Rex, and yes, it’s a bit bitey!

This is one of those books, and I suspect series, where if you don’t like the protagonist you’re absolutely going to hate it. Because it’s from her perspective then everyone else is reflect in that lens and in some cases are a bit broad-brush. But handily a disaster magnet, short, red-head with a smart mouth and an attraction to the dark-haired, blue-eyed competent tech guy is definitely in my wheelhouse so I had a great time with this book. I will agree that it does have one of those moments where grownups completely fail to talk to each other sensibly and so there is a massive emotional blow-up that could have been avoided. At the same time this did feel relatively realistic as the people in question were suffering shock and possibly PTSD so I actually felt a failure to communicate was plausible. If it keeps happening I may get more annoyed…