Rating: 3 stars
CBR14 Bingo: Time (the whole book is about time travel to different points in Earth's history)
Dr. Madeleine "Max" Maxwell is recruited by the seemingly rather mundane St. Mary's Institute of History, only to discover that they are actually a secret organisation that time travels to various points in history, for research purposes. Obviously, you can't just throw anyone into a time machine and have at it, so there's a lot of training. Then there's the fact that time travel is rather dangerous, and she starts to see why there aren't all that many historians actually working long-term for St. Mary's. Most don't have what it takes, and either quit or get killed in action.
Nevertheless, Max manages not only to pass training but after a series of misadventures, to be one of the few historians left on active duty. After some missions back in time where something always seems to go mysteriously wrong, Max is let in on a secret. St. Mary's is not the only group of time travelers out there, and their rival group is not just interested in observing and documenting different parts of history. Some of the higher-ups in St. Mary's are in fact from the future and have come back in time specifically to found the organisation, to fight the rogue time travelers who want to exploit history for profit and who have no qualms about killing any member of St. Mary's they come across.
Max's adventures take her to 11th Century England, World War I France, and even all the way back to the Cretaceous Period to observe and document dinosaurs (!), but there may be traitors among the crew at St. Mary's and coming back from her missions alive and unharmed is not guaranteed. She learns almost too late that some that she had considered friends are far from it, and if she's not clever and resourceful, she may end up as dinosaur snack food.
This is the first in a long series of books and novellas, collectively known as The Chronicles of St. Mary's. Jodi Tayor started these books back in 2013, and book 13 was published earlier this year. There are also more novellas than I bothered counting on Goodreads. My friend Ida really likes them and has read the whole series, if I'm not mistaken. Based on the first book, I'm not entirely sure if I can be bothered continuing with the series. The book starts slowly and there is a lot of exposition. I get that the author felt the need to explain the hows and whys of St. Mary's and the time travel, but it got a bit dull. The first third or so of the book felt like rather a slog, then the plot got a lot more interesting, only to get a bit long-winded and meandering towards the end of the story again.
Part of the challenge here is that we keep being introduced to a fairly large gallery of characters, only for some of them to get killed off or disappear early in the story. Some characters are referred to with more than one name, making it a bit confusing who's actually in any given scene. Max is not always an easy character to root for, something I wouldn't necessarily have minded if the plot was holding my attention. There's a romance subplot that could absolutely have been better developed, and just felt a bit tacked on, with no good build-up for how or why these characters liked each other or were attracted to one another, not to mention some rather erratic behaviour from both characters that didn't exactly fill me with confidence for their continued happiness in future books.
A quick glance through my digital book collection shows me that I own the second book in audio and the fourth book as an e-book, both acquired in sales, so I may give the series another chance at a future point in time. After all, I'm now a huge fan of several series that took two or three books to really catch my interest.
Judging a book by its cover: It seems as if this book has had a variety of covers, some of them rather odd. One of the covers seems to be a muddle of pastel clouds, a teacup, and some generically "Britain" images in the background. Then there's one with a big swirly clock face on the bottom half, while there's a scene from some classical time period, with a topless dude wearing half a toga running past some temple-like buildings. I much prefer the edition I have, with sections in shades of red and black and dinosaur silhouettes. Dinosaurs rule.
Crossposted on Cannonball Read.
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