I’m a big Doctor Who fan, and that’s either caused by, or the cause of, how much I enjoy time travel stories. Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, I love the games that writers can play with time travel, messing around with history, jumping forward and backward (sometimes by just a few minutes) trying to keep someone from taking just the wrong action at just the wrong time, and occasionally seeing the effect of a change before the time-traveler can even think of making the change in the first place.
If I have one quibble with time-travel stories, it’s that sometimes writers can be a little vague about cause and effect. If a time-traveler goes back and injures someone in the past, then that person’s future self should remember having the injury; scenes in movies like Looper where the victim looks down and sees scars (and worse) appearing are undeniably cool to watch, but I don’t know that the scars should really be a surprise. Even more annoying are when paradoxes are left hanging: travel from a dystopian future to the past, stop the actions that caused the dystopian future so it never happens, which then cancels out the future person’s reason for traveling back in the past. For most time-travel stories, if you follow the story’s own logic you eventually get to a place where the story itself could never happen.
Rysa Walker manages to avoid most of these problems in her debut novel Timebound with the invention of the CHRONOS keys. The mechanism for time travel also creates a field that protects the wearer from the effects of changing time. With that one invention she solves the paradox problem, which is great for many of the characters in the story, since they can watch how events change without being effected by it. Not so great is that their loved ones can forget them when a time change stops a relationship from starting, and God forbid the wearer or their ancestor is killed in the past, because then their entire existence depends on never letting the CHRONOS key out of their reach. Ever.
The main character, Kate, was a pleasant surprise from her first appearance. She’s a smart, pretty, teenage girl, with none of the usual young-adult-book hangups. She’s intelligent, but there’s no pack of marauding popular girls to bully her. Her parents are divorced, but she’s adjusted to spending half her time with each parent, perfectly okay with the comfy chaos of her father’s university apartment, and her mother’s take-no-prisoners attitude to everything. No boyfriend, but only because she hasn’t had anything in common with the high-school boys her best friend Charlene has set her up with. She’s resilient, and no more self-conscious than any other teenager, which is a plus when she’s had to bail on her classes on two separate occasions due to a massive, almost heart-stopping panic attack when she was convinced that something was horribly wrong, but could never figure out what.
Kate’s grandmother is introduced in the first chapter, and she’s the one who gets the story going. It turns out that Katherine is a time-traveler, a CHRONOS historian who traveled from the far future as a researcher of the past. Something happened to the CHRONOS organization that destroyed the main time-traveling hub, stranding Katherine and all the other travelers in the past. It was sheer chance that Katherine was stuck in the 1960’s instead of her preferred location in 1893, and she’s used the intervening decades to collect the CHRONOS keys from the other travelers, and to influence things just enough until she had a granddaughter with the time-traveling gene, someone who could sense (without knowing what it was) that something has been changing history in a big way.
I felt that Kate was unbelievably lucky with the people she choose to confide in. The stories she tells people are crazy, but they’re accepted without a whole lot of debate. I have to admit that having photos of relationships that don’t exist suddenly disappear when they leave the CHRONOS field would be pretty convincing, and it does move the story along a bit faster when you don’t have any instances of, “Oh dear, you’ve obviously been under a lot of stress, let me get you some pills…”
Mostly it’s what Rysa Walker can do with the element of time-travel that makes this book so fascinating.I kept trying to catch the author in an inconsistency about the effect of changing history, and how the CHRONOS field can protect things, but as far as I can tell she manages to stick to her own rules, as confusing as they are. And she can be sneaky about things as well; at one point she throws in a quick bit of evidence that history has been changed before we’re even properly introduced to the time-travel element, but Kate (and thus the reader) doesn’t even pay attention to it, since to her that was already part of how things have always been. Characters meet each other in different places in history, at different points in their own history, and everyone has an edited version of the truth to tell to try to keep the wrong thing from happening, or make sure it happens the way it was supposed to. And unlike some other time travel stories, if something isn’t fixed the first time you can always jump back and try again. And again. And again. One character mentions having to make repeated attempts at something, and it’s almost a throwaway line until the full meaning hit me and I got a chill at the idea of having to see something go very wrong, many, many times.
The facet of the story that the author keeps going back to, and which I’m sure will be central to the series, is the morality of changing time at all, for anyone, at any time. Kate’s trying to fix her own history for obvious reasons, but there are people who remember her from a reality that never happened for her, and they would give a lot to have that Kate back. And there are people in the new version of history who are perfectly happy, and are obviously traumatized at the idea that all of it could go away, forever, and they’d never even realize it. And possibly most heartbreaking is the fact that Kate herself experiences things while she’s trying to repair the damage to history, and she has to face the fact that she’s guaranteed to loose something whether she succeeds or fails. There’s a love triangle (it’s a young adult book, of course there’s a love triangle), but it’s a different set-up from most love triangles, and the result is going to be interesting when each member has the other two’s best interest at heart, and events of the story could wipe one or both of them out of existence.
But on a purely personal note, one of the things I loved best about this was the setting of the trips to the past: the 1983 Chicago World’s Fair. Rysa Walker did a lot of research on this era, and I’m beyond thrilled that one of her sources was The Devil in the White City. I’ve read maybe a dozen history books in my lifetime, and that one’s definitely my favorite. And yes, the events from that chapter in history will come into play in this book right from the prologue.