Opinions of a Wolf

Summary:
It’s 2015, and Denny Younger of New Cardiff, California, is a caste of 8.  He loves reading and studying but he knows he will probably end up working in the shops just like his father.  But when he takes his placement test, he’s offered a position that he is promised is better, but he can’t know anything about it until he starts working, and he must leave his family behind.  Denny’s family life is in pieces, so he eagerly agrees.  Before he knows it, he is re-caste as a 5 and soon discovers that he will be traveling through time as an observer, recording family histories for the elite.  Even the smallest error in time-travel can have far-reaching consequences, and before he knows it, Denny finds himself racing against time (and other time-travelers) to fix everything.  But what does fixing everything actually mean?

Review:
I love a good time-travel book, so when Audible offered this one up to me for review, I eagerly agreed.  This is an action-packed book but with far less time-travel than it originally appears and much more parallel universes.

The basic premise of the book is that this is the year 2015 in a wold where the American Revolution never occurred.  Without the American Revolution, the British Empire ended up taking over most of the world (except East Asia).  Everyone is sorted into extremely strict castes, and family history is everything.  These people haven’t made it to the moon yet, but they have managed to discover time-travel.  And they use this discovery solely to send people called “rewinders” back in time to verify people’s ancestry to solidify their ranking in this world.  Now, this was my first major problem with the book, and it’s a plot point I just never was able to let go of.  This society acknowledges the risk of the butterfly effect and yet they brazenly send people willy-nilly through time risking everything for what? Geneaology.  And this has been going on for decades with no ill effects.  Perhaps other readers can get past the idea that a federally (er, royally) backed agency would do this, but I simply could not.

Naturally, when our brave hero goes back in time, he is the first to woops his way into a butterfly effect.  He knows he’s probably done it (he causes someone to leave a location 12 seconds late), but he still pops back up into the present to check on things.  Once there, it takes him days to figure out that he’s changed history.  Daaaaays.  It should really not take him this long to figure this thing out.  Denny causes a change.  Denny pops up to the present.  Denny has troubling connecting to his companion (a person in the present who grounds the person time-traveling), so he gets sick for a few days.  Denny then wanders through our universe’s New York City and can’t figure out what’s going on.  It takes traveling to California’s New Cardiff (in our world, Los Angeles) and seeing that his family home is gone to figure out what’s happened.  Really? A person who has been trained in time-travel takes this long to figure out this very basic time-travel problem?  It’s hard to believe, especially after we’ve been told repeatedly how smart Denny is, that he could be that stupid.

Denny then starts living in Los Angeles to investigate this parallel universe.  He naturally meets a girl and falls for her.  He then has trouble deciding whether to put everything back or not.  And of course there are other rewinders out there he must contend with.

The basic plot idea is interesting.  What would have happened if there had been no American Revolution and how would a person from that society react if they discovered a different option for their lives? But how the author gets there isn’t fully thought-out or fleshed-out enough.  There are too many logical fallacies, such as the ones I’ve laid out above.  That said, it was a fun read with a different plot than what has been coming from a lot of YA recently.  I was glad to see a scifi that contains some history for YA readers.  I also appreciated how many women characters are present in the book, including Denny’s trainer and his nemesis.  Similarly, Denny’s world is extremely lacking in diversity due to the success of the British empire and its traditionalism.  When he travels to our world, he immediately encounters greater diversity, both of race and of sexuality, and he seems to appreciate that, which is a nice touch.

The narrator does a good job both keeping a good pace and setting the tone for the book.  While I understand why the narrator uses a British accent for the British characters from the 1700s, the history geek in me was frustrated, since the stereotypical modern “British accent” didn’t exist back then.  (I knew this from my History BA, but here’s an article that explains what I’m talking about).

Overall, this book has an interesting premise and fast-moving plot.  It has some romance, but is thankfully free of any love triangles.  Time-travel fans may be frustrated by how easily characters brush off the real presence of time-travel issues.  The science of time-travel is simply not explored enough, nor is history.  However, YA readers looking for a quick read and something different in the genre will most likely enjoy it.

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3 out of 5 stars

Length: 300 pages – average but on the shorter side

Source: Free download from Audible in exchange for my honest review

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