A woman working for a top secret government organization related to time travel must unpack debates about power, race, love, propriety, and causality as she defends her charge, Commander Graham Gore, who was plucked from the 1800s and seems to have people in the present ready to find and kill him.
This debut from Kaliane Bradley got ALL the hype. I went into this book thinking I would be down for some time travel silliness, à la Loki or Palm Springs, where humorous, fish-out-of-water situations were the main focus and the emotional storyline would be somewhat secondary, but still poignant. While it wasn't what I expected at all, and at times I struggled to get through the building middle of the story, the banger of an ending totally captivated me. Reviewers have billed it as “The Time Traveler’s Wife” meets “A Gentleman in Moscow,” and I think that is a much more apt description. Had I known this going in, I may have enjoyed the story even more, but it was a great read regardless.
An unnamed main character, a mixed-race professional woman, works in a secret government organization that is plucking various people out of time and bringing them into the present, usually before they meet an untimely death. Various members of the organization are assigned to mind these charges as they adjust to their new circumstances, and our main character is assigned to the charismatic yet grounded Commander Graham Gore, an Arctic explorer who "died" during his expedition. The beginning of the book focuses mostly on Gore's adaptation to modern life, his feelings about his comrades' deaths, and the friendship between the charges. Issues like race and equality, sexuality and propriety, and gender and power are discussed, and it seems that the experiment may have been a success, until things start to go wrong. Is it a side-effect of the time travel? Is it the work of another, more nefarious organization? Can our main character trust those she works with, trust that Gore is still sane, or trust herself as she develops feelings for him?
At times, it felt like Bradley built our main character up to be this calm, cool, collected secret agent, only to have her take a backseat as we watch Gore step up and take command of situations. I felt like I was being led in the direction of Sarah Conner from Terminator 2, when more often than not, our main character ended up acting more like Sarah Conner from Terminator. I would be fine if the progression of her character was more linear in this way, but it felt a bit out of order to me. At times, the love story felt a bit cringey with power dynamics, and some of the deeper discussions that were held about very large, important topics felt a bit unresolved, but was I invested in the main character's relationship all the same? Absolutely.
All in all, I liked the side characters more than I liked the main character, and, to me, they went on more interesting journeys. The other characters who were plucked out of different time periods and bonded with Gore were such fun to read about, and I would read an entire series about each of them.
And that ending-oh the ending!-was where Bradley really killed it. I was feeling so-so about the book, but the ending made me reexamine everything I had read up until this point. I did not see all of the twists coming, and I don't want to spoil anything, but if you like a good time travel drama, I recommend giving this a try. This book was a solid 4/5 for me.
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