Tag: time travel

Top Ten Tuesday | Books Set In Another Time – The Past

Posted February 24, 2025 by Haze in Top Ten Tuesday, Weekly Book Memes / 33 Comments

Welcome to Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly bookish meme hosted by Jana @ That Artsy Reader Girl that features a different bookish topic every week.

Today’s topic is Books Set in Another Time

I was overwhelmed by all the books I could pick for this topic and so I decided to narrow it down a little and only do books set in the past. Maybe next time I’ll do one set in the future or some other time. I do enjoy historical fiction very much, and these are some of the ones I loved!

Top Ten Books Set In Another Time – The Past

  1. The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon – Set in 1789. This is historical fiction/biographical fiction based on real people and true events that happened in Maine in the 1780s. I just finished it at the time of this writing and I loved it! I would highly recommend it!
  2. My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows – Set in an alternate universe of 1500s England where shapeshifters are a thing. I loved this one and the TV series too, and I’m so bummed that the series got cancelled.
  3. Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid – I cannot believe that I’m calling a book set in the 1990s historical fiction but sadly, here we are. I’m not a sporty person and I don’t know anything about tennis, but this is one of my favorite books by the author.
  4. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett – It spans the 1950s to 1990s and explores racial issues in America during that time. I am wholly ignorant about American racial issues but this was such a good look into what it was like at the time. Such an amazing book I still think about it.
  5. Universe of Two by Stephen P. Kiernan – Set during WW2, this is another author whose works I love. I would happily recommend all his other books as well, but not all of them are historical fiction and this is one I really loved that fit the bill.
  6. The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel – This one has the distinction of being the “oldest” in that it’s set during prehistoric times. I loved it when I read it, decades ago, but I never finished the series and I’m feeling the itch to reread.
  7. The Light Bearer by Donna Gillespie – I’ve talked about this one a lot, but it’s so underrated that I feel the need to talk about it as much as possible to keep it alive! It’s set in Ancient Roman times, and it’s one of the top ten, maybe top five, most influential books in my life.
  8. Imperial Woman by Pearl S. Buck – Set during the Qing Dynasty in China. Another one of my favorite books that I’ve mentioned before. It’s funny because it’s a book I’ve reread many times but never finished – the last few chapters just seemed irrelevant to me back then and I haven’t reread it recently. Maybe I’ll try finishing it one day.
  9. The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah – Set in Texas, 1934, during the Dust Bowl. As with so much of history, this was another era I’m completely ignorant about, but this book was so emotionally devastating and I felt so much for the characters and their story.
  10. 11/22/63 by Stephen King – The time frame is in the title! Everyone knows I’m a huge fan of King, and of course, I had to include this book because it’s one of my favorites (I have so many though!). It’s not strictly historical fiction because it’s time travel, but it is technically historical fiction because it’s majorly set in the past about real historical figures. It’s an amazing book, regardless!

Have you read any of these books? What did you think of them? Would you read any of these books?

Tags: , , ,

Book Review | The Unmaking of June Farrow by Adrienne Young

Posted December 3, 2024 by Haze in Book Reviews / 0 Comments

The Unmaking of June Farrow by Adrienne Young

A woman risks everything to end her family’s centuries-old curse, solve her mother’s disappearance, and find love in this mesmerizing novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Spells for Forgetting.

In the small mountain town of Jasper, North Carolina, June Farrow is waiting for fate to find her. The Farrow women are known for their thriving flower farm—and the mysterious curse that has plagued their family line. The whole town remembers the madness that led to Susanna Farrow’s disappearance, leaving June to be raised by her grandmother and haunted by rumors.

It’s been a year since June started seeing and hearing things that weren’t there. Faint wind chimes, a voice calling her name, and a mysterious door appearing out of nowhere—the signs of what June always knew was coming. But June is determined to end the curse once and for all, even if she must sacrifice finding love and having a family of her own.

After her grandmother’s death, June discovers a series of cryptic clues regarding her mother’s decades-old disappearance, except they only lead to more questions. But could the door she once assumed was a hallucination be the answer she’s been searching for? The next time it appears, June realizes she can touch it and walk past the threshold. And when she does, she embarks on a journey that will not only change both the past and the future, but also uncover the lingering mysteries of her small town and entangle her heart in an epic star-crossed love.

With The Unmaking of June Farrow, Adrienne Young delivers a brilliant novel of romance, mystery, and a touch of the impossible—a story you will never forget.

The Reason

It’s a buddy read and it sounded interesting!

The Quotes

“You may have ruined my life, June. But first, you gave me one.”

“We stood there, four generations of Farrow women, cursed to live between worlds. But in that moment, in the valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains, we existed only in one.”

“I had only one ambition in my simply built life, and that was to be sure the Farrow curse would end with me. It was as good a place as any to end a story. I wasn’t the first Farrow, but I would be the last.”

My Thoughts

On the pacing
I didn’t know it was a time travel story when I picked it up! The description sure didn’t mention any of that, but I liked that it pretty much went quickly into the time travel storyline rather than keep us hanging. In fact, I think the thing I liked most about it is that things moved quickly and we get into the meat of the story immediately. I was slow to start the book but once I got into it, I couldn’t put it down and had to keep reading! I think if this was a slower-paced story I wouldn’t have liked it as much because a lot of things might not hold up very well if the author gave us more time to contemplate.

On the idea
I tend to give a lot of leeway to time travel stories for how they handle the paradox of the past affecting the future and all of that, and I love the way the author uses a different concept of time travel here and how she resolves the paradox.

On the characters
I don’t feel like the characters in the book were developed very well. Things moved too fast for us to get to know them deeply. We’re told, not shown, who the love interests are, who the good guys are, who the bad guys are. There’s no subtlety; they’re almost caricatures. And as I mentioned earlier, if this was a slower-paced story, I might hate that about the characters, but since it was so fast-paced, I just went with it and enjoyed the story for what it was.

On the story
Again, the fact that it was fast-paced helped to gloss over a lot of the things I feel are unresolved; details that I won’t mention here, but of the things that did get resolved, I do like how they got resolved.

Overall
I loved the pacing and the time travel idea. I really loved the story too, in and of itself. I think that the character development and connections were the weakest part of the book but easy to overlook because of the fast pace. However, I won’t dwell too much on that because if I do, I’ll start nitpicking and I don’t think I need to do that with this book. It’s good as it is and I enjoyed reading it very much!

My Rating

⭐⭐⭐/5 stars.

Have you read this book? Would you read this book? Did you like the book or do you think you would like it?

Tags: , , , ,

Book Review | Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Posted May 8, 2024 by Haze in Book Reviews / 1 Comment

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

A novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal–an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.’

For the Reading Challenge(s):
2024 52 Book Club Reading Challenge (Prompt #47: Self-insert by an author)
2024 Audiobook Challenge
2024 Library Love Challenge

The Reason

This is my in-person book club’s May BOTM pick. However, I did borrow it from the library on audio before it was confirmed as the BOTM, just because it was available and I’d been wanting to read it.

The Quotes

“If definitive proof emerges that we’re living in a simulation, the correct response to that news will be So what. A life lived in a simulation is still a life.”

“This is the strange lesson of living in a pandemic: life can be tranquil in the face of death.”

“What you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself.”

“Perhaps we believe on some level that if the world were to end and be remade, if some unthinkable catastrophe were to occur, then perhaps we might be remade too, perhaps into better, more heroic, more honorable people.”

The Narrator(s)

John Lee, Dylan Moore, Arthur Morey, Kirsten Potter. I had a really hard time listening to John Lee’s narration of his part of the book. I don’t know if it was the recording or the accent, or some other factor. I didn’t have the same problem with the other narrators. I could hear them all clearly.

My Thoughts

I didn’t know what to expect going in, especially since when looking at the different parts of the book, they were separated by such huge time gaps. I should’ve realized that it would turn out to be a time travel story. All of the different parts of the book and the different characters’ stories felt like very interesting slice of life stories. I love how they all connected, and I loved how the story was told. It’s not thrilling or exciting in the way most time travel stories usually are, but it was thrilling and exciting in its own way.

My Feels

There was some discussion about how Olive’s story in the book was a self-insert by the author; the questions asked of her as she went on her book tour, the sexism on being a woman writer away from her child while her husband stayed home to “babysit”. In the book it was 2203 when it happened, but it resonates because things are happening in our current times that make me feel like we might be going backwards. It’s scary and maddening.

Other than that, I always enjoy time travel stories and how different ones have different ways to explain the time travel paradox. I like how it was handled here, and I’ll always believe in the possibility of it.

My Rating

⭐⭐⭐⭐/5 stars.

Have you read this book? Would you read this book? Did you like the book or do you think you would like it?

Tags: , , , ,

This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub | Book Review

Posted November 30, 2023 by Haze in Book Reviews / 3 Comments

This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub

What if you could take a vacation to your past?

With her celebrated humor, insight, and heart, beloved New York Times bestseller Emma Straub offers her own twist on traditional time travel tropes, and a different kind of love story.

On the eve of her 40th birthday, Alice’s life isn’t terrible. She likes her job, even if it isn’t exactly the one she expected. She’s happy with her apartment, her romantic status, her independence, and she adores her lifelong best friend. But her father is ailing, and it feels to her as if something is missing. When she wakes up the next morning she finds herself back in 1996, reliving her 16th birthday. But it isn’t just her adolescent body that shocks her, or seeing her high school crush, it’s her dad: the vital, charming, 40-something version of her father with whom she is reunited. Now armed with a new perspective on her own life and his, some past events take on new meaning. Is there anything that she would change if she could?

The Reason

Full disclosure, the reason I picked this book up was because I had just finished another book on audio right before bed, and I needed a new one to sleep to (I have trouble falling asleep and audiobooks help), and these were one of the books my library had available immediately.

To be fair, I was also intrigued by the time-travel aspect, because I love time-travel stories and philosophical questions of “what would you do if you could go back in time…?” so that’s also the reason I picked it out of the other available audiobooks my library had.

The Quotes

“Any story could be a comedy or a tragedy, depending on where you ended it. That was the magic. How the same story could be told an infinite number of ways.”

“All her life, she’d thought of death as the single moment, the heart stopping, the final breath, but now she knew that it could be much more like giving birth, with nine months of preparations. Her father was heavily pregnant with death, and there was little to do but wait.”

“The way you spend your days is the way you spend your life.”

“Grief was something that moved in and stayed. Maybe it moved from one side of the room to the other, farther away from the window, but it was always there.”

The Characters

I’m a character-driven reader so I gotta talk a bit about them. I’m not gonna list out all the characters here, only the ones who stood out to me and why I liked/disliked them.

Alice – the MC and time-traveler. I found her a little wishy-washy at first, but then I realized later how relatable that was, because heck, I have no idea what I’m doing either. What I loved about her was that she was able to experiment and grow from the mistakes she made and lessons she learned. Maybe she didn’t really know what was important to her in the beginning, but I think she figured it out at the end.

Leonard – Alice’s father. I loved what a great father he was and the way he was so present for Alice. I also love that he wasn’t too stubborn to take advice and suggestions from teenagers. There’s just something so wholesome about him as a father, and the way he took care of Alice.

Sam – Alice’s best friend. I love how supportive she was as a friend. Going along with Alice even when she was skeptical, and being all in anyway. I wish we could all have a friend like Sam.

Ursula – the cat. Oh, the cat. I loved that cat. I love that she was there the whole time.

My Thoughts

This book started out slow for me at first. I was quite lukewarm about it in the beginning but I got more and more into it as we got to know Alice and watch her journey. I really loved that this book was about relationships and the people we love. I love that at the end of the day, the things that matter most aren’t status and material things, like the house you live in or the clothes you wear, but that you are happy and have people whom you love and who love you.

My Feels

This book made me feel big feelings. I do ask myself that question sometimes, “What would you do if you could go back in time?” and I have a lot of grief and regrets about certain things, and I sometimes wonder if I could’ve changed anything or “saved” anyone, and I realize you can’t really change or save anyone except yourself, and I honestly might’ve settled for just saving myself if I could go back in time. Reading this book, watching Alice discovering herself through this journey, and seeing the kind of relationship Alice had with her father was just absolutely beautiful.

My Rating

5/5 stars. I wavered a little between 4 and 5 stars because the beginning was slow and I wasn’t feeling Alice at first, but I think that was sort of the point, and the fact that it tugged at my emotions so hard means that it more than deserves 5 stars.

Have you read this book? Would you read this book? Did you like the book or do you think you would like it?

Tags: , , ,