Thursday, August 18, 2022

Book 24: The Psychology of Time Travel by Kate Mascarenhas

I picked up this book while browsing at the library last week. 

Four women invent a time machine in the 1960's. When one of them Barbara suffers some kind of breakdown in front of the press, she is sent to a psychiatric hospital and exiled from the team and the successful time travel business that develops. 

The book jumps back and forth from character to character and time to time. It gets confusing especially because some minor characters are given their own chapters and relate only tangentially to the main characters. It's hard to keep them all straight.

Ultimately, I didn't really like any of the characters. Most of the time-travelers become jaded and lose empathy for non-time travelers. Hazing rituals designed to harden new recruits to protect against breakdowns such as Barbara's are needlessly cruel. 

A few minor thoughts.

Multiple versions of time travelers can exist together, so we have the silly image of 55 Angharads dancing a ballet at a wedding.  

All of the main characters are women with a few men as love interests or husbands. I didn't even notice this until I read a review that mentioned it. 

A nitpick. Some of the dialogues didn't have paragraph breaks between the speakers. It was confusing to determine just who was speaking, and took me out of the story.

Overall, I'm glad I read the book but wouldn't recommend it. 

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