2018 science fiction, ninth in the Chronicles of St Mary's series
(time travel). More adventures in history!
Well, um. It's Taylor's own fault that the big plot here didn't
work for me. She raised the point several books ago that this is time
travel and even if you have seen the series' Big Villain absolutely
and definitely die that doesn't mean you won't meet him again doing
stuff that (in his timeline) he had already done before he died.
So it's a bit bloody silly that St Mary's and the Time Police are
collaborating on a plan to try to catch and kill him, and expecting
him to stop being a nuisance thereafter. And nobody seems to think of
this. They don't say things like "let's grab him from some relatively
early point in his own timeline, then send him directly to the time at
which we know he will die". The series has forgotten its own premise.
All right, you can argue that to some extent you have to forget this
in order to have a coherent narrative, but Max and the others are
still living in their own experiential time, so…
Apart from that it's quite fun. Tudor England, the burning of
Persepolis, and then Max is marooned in time (in a way that really
shouldn't work; she's at the physical site of Future St Mary's, all
she should have to do is leave a note in the right vault and the
rescue squad should show up instantly) and has to make a life of it.
At the same time there's the grotty University liaison, now recovered
from his case of "leprosy" and causing trouble again.
“No, he’s made a very good point,’ said Bashford provocatively.
‘Women are just vessels, you know.’
‘That’s very true,’ said Sykes, smiling angelically at him. ‘I
myself am a seventeen-thousand-ton Dreadnought class battleship with
enough firepower to destroy a medium-sized city.”
There's some good stuff here, even if Max is prone to fall into
self-pity about all the horrible things that have happened to her and
forget that her friends have had horrible things happening to them
too. But it's definitely more soap-opera caused by time travel than it
is time travel. Even though, of the time travel series I've read, it's
still the one that comes closest.
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