Book Review - The Psychology of Time Travel

[Amy Darvill]

Title of the Book: The Psychology of Time Travel
Author: Kate Mascarenhas
Genre: Science Fiction/Fantasy
Series: No

(Notice: the book is adult fiction and details adult matters. Young readers should skip this one for now. I would say an older teenager could read this.)

Brief Overview: Back in 1967, four female scientists come together to create the first time travel machine. Just as they are to debut it, however, one suffers a breakdown during the first interview. To protect the project, the other three women vote to eliminate Bree from the project, erasing her contributions from the annals of history.

Fifty years later, the three women have turned time travel into big business and a sort of isolated club. They have their own lingo, a unique moral system, and they have strict tests to pass, and not just the paper kind. In this period, we have two ladies, Ruby, the granddaughter of Bree, and Odette, the witness of a strange murder. Both women want to solve the murder but for different reasons. Ruby's grandmother received an odd gift that Ruby fears is foretelling her death, and Odette just wants to know why and how someone in a locked room can be killed. However, when your killer can travel through time, how can you catch them? If you are yourself a time traveler, could your future self have done it and you just don't know? And who even is the victim?

Review: It was okay. Part of it is I went in thinking the mystery was a bigger part then it was? It's much more literary/women's fiction than a murder mystery. The mystery is there to provide a goal for the characters, particularly Ruby, but solving it is not actually the book's objective. It's much more an exploration of how time travel can change your perspective and affect interpersonal relationships. The author has a degree in psychology, and it shows in both a good and bad way. The characters are believable up to a point, but I didn't feel super connected to them. The one I was most connected to was Odette, probably because her story was the most 'detective' part of the book.

That is also the other thing with the book. Between chapters taking place in the past and the future (basically at different points in this 50 year timeline) and other minor characters getting center stage, it can be a touch confusing. Plus, I don't think there was ever a deep enough dive to satisfy me. It's more widespread. You get an idea of how the agency works and some of the oddball, even twisted aspects of it, you get a sense of how the original four ladies have changed due to both personal issues and the time travel aspects, and you get kind of an oddball time travel based romance. But none of them quite satisfied. And maybe part of is, even though I'm not a super dark reader, I wanted it to go that way a bit more. I mean, one of the games/hazing that time travel agents go through is to go through time, find a random person and tell them a loved one is going to die soon (having already looked it up and went to the future to see it). That's a terrible thing, and it's mentioned as it, but it also never quite tormented me as the reader enough. Ultimately, the book either needed to be longer to give everything more structure, or more things needed to be trimmed.

It was a satisfying enough read on the plane ride, and it's fairly short, but it's not worth a reread. 3/5 stars. I will say it's the author's first book, so some of the awkwardness might just be due to inexperience.