Recursion by Brian J Walton starts with a bang as Molly, narrator and main character, slides out of the time travel tunnel into 1950s Paris and a burning hotel. The tunnel station in 1950s Paris is in a hotel basement and the entire building is on fire. More, Interlopers – other time travelers from unsanctioned groups – are present and shooting to kill.
I thought this might be one of the time travel series where bad guys are trying to change history and the Time Patrol (or whatever name the author chooses) try to keep history on the straight and narrow. Books with this time travel plot can be a lot of fun and it’s always interesting to see how the author will spin the inevitable paradoxes. Will the time travelers even be able to change history? Will changes spawn new parallel worlds? Will the resulting paradox cause total collapse?
Unfortunately Walters’ novel started to flag a bit as we got deeper into the story. I kept waiting for Molly to ask some obvious questions, such as the one prompted by her mentor, Helen’s comment, “that’s what the ISD pretends to do.” C’mon. Who wouldn’t follow up on a lead in like that?
The paradoxes were left as paradoxes. Molly had multiple memory sets of different pasts, married, not married, and the Interlopers were able to change events by having someone and their time traveler duplicate get close. Walters kept using the phrase “own timeline” to describe going back or forwards in time during one’s own lifetime.
I finished the entire novel but was not intrigued enough to look for its sequels. Molly as a character didn’t have a lot of depth, although in fairness it is hard to be deep when you are running for your life. The back story looked interesting but the villain and his almost-magical powers seemed ridiculous. If I were the bad guy in this story I’d be doing a lot different things than chasing Molly to find out what her Dad was up to. The bad guy was cardboard, a stock villain character.
The writing was uneven. The last third of the novel seemed disjointed and didn’t make a lot of sense while the first third was good.
Overall I’d give this 3 stars. Keep in mind Walters is a fairly new author and may improve in future books.
I received a free copy via Instafreebie and the links here are referral links to Amazon.
The first third of this review starts off strong but the writing became uneven when the author of this post started inexplicitly referring to the books author as “Walters” instead of “Walton”… C’mon. Who would make a mistake like that when the author’s name is posted right on the front of the book?! 😉