This Is My Last

Just Finished Reading: Time Travel for Beginners

I like time travel stories ever since I watched Marty McFly in Back to the Future series. I enjoy all the hijinks that are typically associated with time traveling, all the paradoxes and all the past-affecting-future and future-affecting-past.

Here in Time Travel for Beginners by Jaclyn Moriarty, time traveling doesn't seem to factor much in the story. It's all sightseeing and tours for quite a while -- and also wonderful characters in eveyday parent-and-teenager life. I was about to write-off time traveling as just a McGuffin when all of a sudden, timelines start to matter. Not in a Back to the Future Part 2 way in terms of plot devices, but in a life-and-death because-of-timelines kind of situation.

Time traveling in the story is there, it seems, just for the characters to look back into their past. The plot is not complicated -- certainly the past and the future doesn't have too much interaction, and there isn't the usual trope of the cause-and-effects in a typical time traveling story. I didn't find out too much about the book before I started reading it, but I can't find any marketing materials advertising this as a time traveling (as in Back to the Future) story. Perhaps I've the wrong expectations coming in, just because of the title of the book.

Maybe because of that, I didn't find the time traveling part of the story to be working for me. I really enjoyed the first two-third of the story -- the romance, the young adult situations, all the drama. The ending seems somewhat contrived and forced. Don't expect a science fiction, and you may be rewarded to a host of wonderful characters. (Except for the three characters at the agency. I still think of them as interchangeable.)

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