Just One Damned Thing after Another

Admittedly, we were off to a rocky start, until I finally got Jodi Taylor's sense of humour. If you're ok with "ghostly figures appeared and disappeared like ghosts" or "dreadful inevitability that is so ... dreadfully inevitable", you'll be fine.

I didn't mind the somewhat patchy storytelling, except for the sudden break between "just being recruited" and "having been there for five years". I actually loved that the Tragic Backstory (tm) wasn't fully revealed. I generally really dislike all those usual flashbacks-conveniently-revealing-the-story narrations. I can't wait for more disaster prone historians.

The more I think about this, the more I think it was closer to 2.5 stars. It's not a bad book, but it's far from a perfect book. First of all, it's way too long. It's 480 pages for no reason, and I couldn't even tell you what took so long. It's like the author took the title to heart and endeavored to make sure it really was one thing after another. Where most books have one, MAYBE two, things as its main event, there were at least 5 big things here. Some of it was necessary for setting up the final showdown but it also just felt really long.

Another difficulty I had with this is that, it is perhaps too British. As an American reader, I certainly don't expect british books to be "translated" in American english, but there was a lot here I didn't understand. I'd read a sentence, realize it made no sense to me, and then reread it and try to figure out what it meant in American english. It was more than trainers for sneakers, bonnet for (car)hood, etc. It was things like "I read around it" to mean "I read up on it". "I read around it" isn't something that Americans say and it's just different enough to make me pause and reread to figure out what the author could have meant.

Another writing style quirk I had an issue with was that the author doesn't seem to give a lot of orienting details. At one point, apparently four years had passed and I wouldn't have had any idea if the character hadn't mentioned it. Likewise, when the characters were going through training in the beginning of the book, I couldn't tell you whether the training was 3 weeks or 3 months.

For all the problems I had with this, it still held my interest and I've already started reading the second book. Some of my complaints are still there, but some of the new author issues that I think were present in this book, have gotten better.

If this hadn't been an audiobook, I'd have hugged it at this point. It's definitely a book I'll want to revisit at a later point, only I think when I do, it won't be audio. And it's a whole series too, which I promptly went to Audible for. The whole lot of them. Every single one they had. (I had a lot of credits). I was also pleased to see that they all had the same narrator, because she too was completely excellent. I started it yesterday, listened pretty much all day and finished it today. It is, as I'm writing this, about 3pm and I've listened all day, save for a couple of hours break to recharge my headphone battery.

The whole tone and feel of the book reminded me rather of Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series. That's another series I need to revisit soon, I think, though again not as audio.

I have read the first two of these and now on the third one. Back to back. Boisterous time travel tales full of badass bookworms (that's a Trope) and featuring a likable main character who despite her obvious competence doesn't like herself at all. Which is to the good. Of course it isn't time travel ... except that it is. That works a lot better than in "Timeline," which the protagonists of this would have duffed up and then gone back in time to duff up all over again, as many times as needed, and then gone down the pub to get duffeted.
The St Mary's culture reminded me in an odd way of the Battlestar Galactica reboot - not exactly military but with that level of attitude and coarse camaraderie, sexually open and egalitarian (those two do tend to go together) and with a sense of its own fragility in the face of always-possible bloodshed and death.
(yes, there are a few holes: not influencing history and then going off and doing just that; the idea that items can be retrieved from the past if they're about to be destroyed, which is then forgotten or handwaved about; and so on. But time travel is paradox anyway.)