Timebound

Timebound by Rysa Walker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Time travel. Complicated. Historical. Try and keep up, ok?

This is the story of Kate, unassuming granddaughter of a woman from the 24th century. She's a regular girl shuffling between her divorced parents, starting school yet again, focused on logical things that make sense and relatively happy with her life. When her grandmother steps back into her life despite a rocky relationship with Kate's mother, things start to get interesting. Turns out Kate has the time-traveling gene, making her the only candidate able to stop a murder at the 1893 World's Fair.

And somebody is messing with time, changing events on a large scale, disrupting Kate's life and family altogether. Fortunately she still has her grandmother and she meets a boy. Enter instalove. It's easy to forgive in this case because the boy is pretty great. These characters are all engaging, with depth and substance. Kate is quick on her feet but not overly confident and sufficiently upset over the timeline change. The secondary characters are all likable, especially Kate's dad Harry. There's even a dog.

Add to that the historical element of the 1893 World's Fair and this turns into one seriously complex story.

This plot is not overly difficult to follow but you do have to pay attention. The trouble is the time travel. Usually it's difficult to pull off because of the constant paradoxes creating plot holes. In this case, the rule is that you can pretty much jump anywhere - but meeting yourself creates two sets of memories which can be difficult to reconcile. There are rules set by the Chronos organization that dictate some basic things, like not changing major things that can create big ripples and generally staying out of the way, limiting their interaction to just observation. There is the mention of some scientist theorizing that there are multiple timelines branching off every time a decision is made - the multiverse idea that explains a lot.

Here's an example of the way this book is complicated: Kate intially has a dream-like encounter with a guy she doesn't know. Then she meets a stranger on a train who knows her. His name is Kiernan - she's 16 and he's a bit older than her, probably around 20-25. Then later, when Kate travels to 1893, she meets an 8 year old boy who turns out to be Kiernan. She meets him yet again as the somewhat-older-than-her guy. He knows her but from a different timeline. And while this is happening, we have the major temporal events happening that are causing changes in the timeline such that Kate's whole world shifts. In one timeline she doesn't even exist.

My problem with this kind of time travel is the inconsistency in the changes. Apparently only really big things change the timeline. But what about the small things? There is really no butterfly effect in this story in as much that small changes don't affect the general outcome. In addition, any changes that happen can be fixed by just traveling back again and undoing what was done. We follow one linear timeline because the time travelers follow one linear timeline. But why is that when multiple timelines happen? The only thing I can figure is that the travelers can jump from one timeline to the next and back again. The trick is to figure out what the big change was that happened to alter the original timeline.

And all this is ok as long as the author sticks her established rules. This gets very, very tricky when the characters can jump the timeline, make a mistake, then jump to 5 minutes before they made the mistake and tell themselves not to make the mistake. But - it's pretty cool when the characters are together and Kate has to jump to a later time, she jumps, meets the people she was with, then jumps back to 5 minutes later than when she left. There are little details that creates loops that tend to bug me; loops make you wonder where everything began.

If you can get past the headache of all this time traveling, the book is really enjoyable. It's a great story about a girl who doesn't like change but adapts out of necessity - and then has to adapt on a grand scale. Each character is quirky and well-defined. Sacrifices have to be made for the greater good. And then there's the overall problem of the bad guys changing things, which isn't clear other than the fact that they're doing it and nobody knows why. Ultimately Kate has to get to the bottom of that. This first book does a lot of world building and establishing the situation and characters. It's a good setup for the future books in the series.

And that ending. What a wonderful, romantic twist.

Kate Rudd narrates this on audio and she is fantastic. She was able to enhance the story and make the characters highly likable. I especially enjoyed Connor, who always talked with food in his mouth. He was the comic relief.

Obviously this isn't your basic little time travel romance. There are a lot of characters and a lot of time traveling. But overall it's a great read; I decided to suspend my questions about the way the time travel worked and just go with it. If you can do that, you get a great story.

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