When I finish an audiobook now, I usually go straight to my library catalog to find my next one. I've gotten into the habit of searching for audiobooks that are available now--sorting by popularity. I still have to sift through some series and genre books, but it usually points me in the right direction. And that is how I found Wrong Place Wrong Time (2022) by Gillian McAllister. I was hoping this novel would keep my interest, but I didn't really know what to expect. And honestly, my expectations were not very high. Fortunately, this novel had interesting characters, a gripping mystery, and an original way of playing with time travel within the novel. I ended up getting more out of it than I expected.
The book begins with Jen waiting for her 18-year-old-son, Todd, to come home on Halloween. She watches him come towards the house, and is then horrified when she sees her son turn and stab another man to death. She watches her son get arrested, and she and her husband go to the police station, but they are turned away without even being able to see him.
The next morning Jen wakes up with her life in tatters. But instead of continuing to live in the nightmare her life had turned into, she has woken up and it is the day before Halloween. Her son has not killed anyone, and she now has a chance to figure out what happened and possibly prevent it.
It turns out that Jen's traveling backwards through time is not entirely linear. Eventually, she does not go back one day at a time, but can leap back weeks, months, or even years. She hypothesizes that she goes back to any time that is important for her understanding of what her son did. Because Jen is always traveling backwards, her actions don't have any long-term consequences. Whatever she did that day, will be erased when she wakes up the next morning. It definitely changes your perspective. But it comes with its challenges as well. She can't accomplish anything that takes more than a day. A person can't send her a report "tomorrow" because Jen is not getting to tomorrow. In addition, if Jen is able to convince someone what's happening to her, she has to go and do it all again the next day when she goes backwards in time again.
Wrong Place Wrong Time certainly explores the question of how much we really know about the people we love. Sure, Todd had been acting more distant these past couple of months, but Jen just chalked that up to normal teenage angst. It was only with hindsight that she could see what she had been missing. The same thing happened with her husband. Jen thought she knew everything about him, but it turns out that she had been missing a lot.
In the end, I was impressed with Wrong Place Wrong Time. I thought it was a good story, originally told, The time travel aspects, and the careful reveal of what was going on was well done. I liked the characters, and felt like they had real, earned emotion. This one was a bit of a happy surprise, but it probably helped that I came in with no expectations.
No comments:
Post a Comment