Tag Archives: time travel

#BookReview ‘How To Stop Time’ by @matthaig1 #humour

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How To Stop Time is another hugely inventive novel by Matt Haig with a thoughtful message about identity. Tom Hazard is a history teacher with a difference. He can talk authoritatively about the Great Fire of London, because he was there; about Shakespeare, because he met him; about witchfinders, because he was terrorised by one. Tom Hazard is 439 years old but he looks forty one. Matt HaigWhen he was thirteen, the process of ageing slowed down. Tom and his mother are protestant Huguenot refugees in England when their life falls apart; his impossibly youthful looks draw accusations of witchery. We see snapshots of Tom’s past life as he teaches history to bored teenagers in London. And all the time he struggles with the past, so much so that he is unable to live in the present. So he exists, rather than lives, changing his identity to survive and losing sight of who he is.
This is a fascinating study of humankind, our development through history and inability to learn from what went before. Tom encounters threats and suspicions in the 21st century. Is he safe? Is a sinister bio-tech company searching for albas – short for ‘albatross,’ ie. long-lived – to use for experiments? And is the mysterious Hendrich, founder of The Albatross Society, a mentor or a threat? At the core of the novel is Tom’s love for his wife Rose, a mayfly – ie. short-lived – who dies of the plague, and their daughter Marion, an alba. Where is Marion now? Will Tom become reconciled with his past enough to live his life to the full, whether it be a long life or short, and will he ever feel free enough to love again?
A philosophical novel about making the best of what you have now without dwelling on the past, which cannot be changed, or worrying about the future, which cannot be predicted.

Read my reviews of these other Matt Haig novels:-
THE HUMANS
THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY

If you like this, try:-
‘Burial Rites’ by Hannah Kent
‘The Photographer’s Wife’ by Suzanne Joinson
‘Pod’ by Laline Paull

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#BookReview HOW TO STOP TIME by @matthaig1 http://wp.me/p5gEM4-2Ts via @SandraDanby

#BookReview ‘The Lives She Left Behind’ by James Long #romance #timetravel

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There was a novel about time-travelling love before The Time Travellers Wife. It is called Ferney, written by James Long, and to my mind is far superior. The Lives She Left Behind is the sequel. James LongWhen I finished Ferney, I couldn’t imagine how the story could continue. After all, we’d worked out how the time travel worked and what the relationship implications and difficulties were. I feared that a sequel would be a let-down, some books are just meant to be stand-alone novels. I am pleased to say I was wrong. The Lives She Left Behind is as heart-wrenching as the first, combined with a thriller element involving murder and sexual assault. Misunderstandings across the centuries, modern policing methods and contemporary parenting, all combine to make the lives of Ferney and Gally difficult. Ferney explains his connection with Gally: ‘Our halves are nothing on their own but half and half make one and halves, divided, stand alone when the adding’s done.’
The second book can be read on its own, but I do urge you to read Ferney first. Both novels are infused with the Somerset countryside and the history of England. Ferney and Gally remember the old names of roads, remember when the tiny plantation of trees was an entire wood, when kings had different names.
Three teenage girls go on their first archaeological dig, not knowing what to expect. Into their lives falls a teenage boy on a bike, pulled to that location by some force within himself. The action moves to the ancient village of Pen Selwood as Ferney and Gally find each other again.
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Read my review of FERNEY.

If you like this, try:-
‘In Another Life’ by Julie Christine Johnson
‘Please Release Me’ by Rhoda Baxter
‘Outline’ by Rachel Cusk

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE LIVES SHE LEFT BEHIND by James Long via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1cy

#BookReview ‘The Seventh Miss Hatfield’ @caltabiano_anna #mystery #suspense

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The Seventh Miss Hatfield by Anna Caltabiano opens with the auction of a painting in 1887 and then switches to 1954 as a girl sits on a doorstep. Cynthia is 11 and aware of her mother’s demands for good behaviour combined with initiative, knowing she is a disappointment. So when a parcel is wrongly delivered, she shows independence by taking it to the house opposite. There she meets a new neighbour, Rebecca Hatfield. Cynthia doesn’t go home again. Anna Caltabiano This is a tale of immortality and time travel. Where immortality means you can still die, of illness or accident, and time travel comes via a large mysterious clock owned by Miss Hatfield. Cynthia – and it is key that we are told her original name only a few times – drinks a glass of lemonade containing a drop of a mysterious substance and everything changes. “I felt as if I was slipping away into some strange dimension where I recognized nothing – not my surroundings, or my feelings, but most terrifyingly of all, not even myself.” Miss Hatfield has a task for Cynthia to do, a task which involves theft and time travel. The task, of course, does not go to plan.
The fine detail is excellent but I found the bigger picture lacking, as if the author was carried away by Cynthia/Margaret’s flirtation with Henley and lost sight of the where this fit into the flow of the narrative. I was impatient for the mystery to move on. Cynthia/Margaret is a girl things happen to, rather than her being a proactive heroine. She spends quite a lot of time waiting for the time to be right, waiting for things to settle down, before she can complete her task. I just wanted her to get on with it. She accepts her new life with minimal heartache or disbelief, demonstrates little longing for her parents and the life she left in 1954 and no cynicism about what Miss Hatfield tells her. She ages instantly from teenager to adult, but we are shown none of the insight this would bring as so ably demonstrated in the film Big. Then I did a bit of Googling and found out that Anna Caltabiano is 17, and I understood. When I read a book for review, I read with a notebook and pen by my side and quite early on I wrote down ‘feels like a young author?’ Despite the ‘literary’ front cover, this is a book written by a teenager for teenagers about young love. If I had known, I would not have chosen to read it and I became a bit more forgiving of the writing style. Another example of a cover design being misleading.
That this novel was written by a 17-year old is admirable and explains the style: lots of explanation of the action of the ‘I understood Henley did this because…’ style. Lots of re-stating the obvious, which should have been edited out. It is clear that Caltabiano was in love with Henley.
This is the first novel of a trilogy. I think I’m too old to read the others, it’s a long time since I was a teenager. But if you know one who likes stories about puppy love combined with time travel, they’ll probably love this. Caltabiano is a talented writer and I will watch out for future novels, but in a few years’ time.

If you like this, try:-
‘The Quick’ by Lauren Owen
‘An Appetite for Violets’ by Martine Bailey
‘Ferney’ by James Long

And if you’d like to tweet a link to THIS post, here’s my suggested tweet:
#BookReview THE SEVENTH MISS HATFIELD @caltabiano_anna via @SandraDanby http://wp.me/p5gEM4-1af