A boy growing up in a rigid dystopia who turns out to be Special. A ritual sorting ceremony that leads the boy to a new life. It seems like a familiar enough premise for YA science fiction, but then something interesting happens: the book turns into a time travel/alternate history story, and a pretty compelling one too. (There’s a fairly good chance of spoilers ahead.)
The setting of the novel is a gray, shabby, caste-based world where the United States never existed, and is instead just part of the decaying British Empire. Technology and medicine are much less advanced…except for that little time travel thing. Denny has been recruited to be a Rewinder, someone who observes the past through time travel. The whole project and its grim Institute is secret, used only as a tool for the upper classes to hang on to their pedigrees by verifying their family histories.
Quibble one: would a world run by the British Empire really be so backwards? I think of the British as being very oriented toward science and technology, but maybe I’m just too much of an Anglophile.
Quibble two: would such a backwards civilization possess time travel technology?
Quibble three: would time travel technology really be used for such a mundane, grubby task? (Actually, yes. Yes, it would.)
Sadly, life for a Rewinder is actually a prison sentence—they’re never allowed to leave the Institute. The Rewinders may only observe, and not make a change. Because one tiny change, as we all know from time travel stories, can make a huge difference.
One slight mistake by Denny causes his world to disappear…and our world to take its place. There’s a lot of “timey-wimey” as they call it in Doctor Who, but it’s fairly simplified; time travelers can meet themselves without the universe exploding. There’s no paradox of “Denny erased himself out of existence so how could he go back in time in the first place?” Denny’s first instinct is to make the world right. Then he begins to like our world better…
The book really began to pick up once Denny reaches our world, with its 7-11s and cars and plastic money. We really only see Denny’s own world clearly through his culture shock. The writing is very crisp, very clean, and very action-oriented, which is like, but I also found myself wanting a bit more texture or detail; I wanted to know more about the dreary New Cardiff and life the British Empire. But maybe that’s the point, to emphasize the gray drabness of his own world—perhaps that’s why his choice is more believable, that he would choose our world over his so quickly.
Plus, I wanted to know more about what it’s like to travel through freaking history! One of my favorite scenes is when Denny, traveling in the 18th century, takes a pill to cut down his sense of smell in a world of unwashed people, strong perfumes, and unpleasant food. I would have enjoyed more details like that. Finally, the villain and the love interest are fairly cardboard figures. The villain is unsurprising, and the love interest is so sudden and forced that it’s hard to care about her fate.
In the end, it was a quick, fun time travel read that took some unexpected twists and turns, despite my small quibbles. Always a good thing to find a new author—Brett Battles has written many other thrillers and scifi.
There’s one more book in the series…maybe that should next on my list?