The Gone World

I really enjoyed this book, and was surprised to see that it didn't get nominated for any awards. Maybe the speculative fiction academy has a bias against books that are fun and interesting? I don't know. I do know that it has a lot of my favorite things in a single package: a tough female law enforcement agent, a character with a disability (but a plot that doesn't revolve around that disability), time travel, time loops, multiple universes, a murder mystery, and creepy religious imagry. This book was a real page-turner, I basically devoured this book in a day. The author had clearly done some research, but the science is introduced quickly and painlessly; no pages-long sweaty dialogues between characters that feel like they should be delivered via PowerPoint, just to make sure you know that this is all based on Real Science. The time travel rules of the world felt scientifically-grounded, but were also fairly simple to follow. By focusing on the idea of time travelling to future POSSIBLE worlds, the book avoided the annoying fatalism that some time travel books seem to blunder into. Of course, towards the climax of the plot, it did feel like the wheels were coming off the tracks a little - maybe the rules of time travel did change a little? And maybe there were a few too many alternate universes in play? And maybe we ended up with the Billl & Ted "this thing will happen now becuase I do it later" thing? - but (a) I've never, ever read an alternate universe/time loop/time travel story where the climax of the plot didn't feel crazy, and (b) the whole book was so much fun, i just didn't care whehter or not eveyrthing held together.

I always read books with an eye as to whether or not I'd recommend it to my 70-year old father, who doesn't much care for gratuitous sex and violence. There is gratuitous sex (I think there are actually only two sex scenes, but they are both totally unnecessary and franiliy pretty unsexy.) There is oodles of gratuitous violence (people are not just beaten up, injured, or shot - they are tortured, decapitated, and maimed at every opportunity.) The book is an odd mixture of being very pro-woman - I realized by the end that basically women are in charge of fixing problems created by men - and weirdly male gaze-y. (The author makes sure you know when a woman is fat or unattractive, but sometimes men aren't described at all.) And I'd say the very, very last few pages of the book are a little hard to wrap my head around. I guess this is something of a spoiler alert (although this really won't make sense unless you read the entire book): This might be the first book where an unplanned teen pregnancy is presensted as a happy ending. But, whatever. This book was fun. Read it at the beach.