Name: TimeRiders
ISBN: 9780802721723

Alex Scarrow

Rescued from imminent death, teens Maddy, Liam, and Sal join forces in 2001 Manhattan to correct changes in history made by other time travelers, using a "time bubble" surrounding the attack on the Twin Towers to hide their journeys.

TimeRiders

Kirsten Simkiss

I’m DNFing this book as of page 128 of 407 pages. In case you’re wondering, that’s the start of Chapter 32. The writing is okay. Nothing spectacular. But there are 90 chapters in this 407 page book! 90! The average chapter is about 4.5 pages. It’s frustrating to me, especially when you know that several hundred trees could have been saved if he’d just allowed some of the chapters to share the same page as the previous chapter, which is a part of the same scene.

Additionally, there are historical inaccuracies. Now, granted, some of them are because it’s a time travel book written about 9 years ago. The fact that this book puts Arnold Schwarzenegger down as the 45th President of the United States is hilarious to me. Honestly, I’d have preferred it to the real 45th President of the United States, although I’m also 100% sure that Schwarzenegger wouldn’t qualify because he wasn’t born in the US. It’s other things that bothered me. For instance, Liam, and Irish character from 1912 who worked aboard the Titanic when it sank didn’t know that India is a bilingual country? England took over India in 1856. This is something people would have known for sure, especially someone who worked on boats going back and forth from Europe. Also, he didn’t know what french fries were. I could see an American not knowing, considering they were popularized by American soliders during WWI, but an Irish kid? I’m not sure that tracks. He might call them chips or frites or something else, but I’m sure he’d know what they were.

The third thing that bugs me is that the main villain, or who I’m assuming is the main villain based on what I’ve read, has decided to travel back in time to make sure Hitler wins the war. Aside from the fact that this would cause a massive paradox as one cannot travel back in time and change the past without destroying their reason to travel to the past in the first place, who the hell wants Hitler to win the war to create a better future? Screw that. I get that Hitler was a bad guy, but does every white author have to bring Hitler back in every book with time travel? I applaud the need to fight the awful people if history, but sometimes you just don’t want to read a sub-par book where Hitler wins the war. It’s exhausting to me, and I can’t imagine how exhausting it is for people who lost loved ones in the holocaust. History should be remembered, lest we become doomed to repeat ourselves, but not this way.

Also, I’m really picky about my time travel. Time travel has to be handled very delicately. Small inconsistencies could result in catastrophic effects that you can’t fix easily. The past is not to be meddled in. So when they do a training mission where Lee Harvey Oswald is stopped from shooting President Kennedy, I did a massive eye roll. By definition, a paradox is something which is contradictory to another thing. If one travels back in time to change time, one then would lose their reason for traveling back in the first place. Take for instance this Kennedy scenario. If someone were to travel back in time to save Kennedy, they would alter the course of history in a meaningful way. However, if Kennedy was saved, time would change in which everyone knew Kennedy survived. The person who is supposed to have traveled back in time to save Kennedy would never have a reason to stop Kennedy from being killed. Because it never happened. In doing this, you have a paradox. One cannot have both in the same reality.

For these reasons, I am not reading further into this book. I have more books clamoring for my attention and this one is not at all up my alley. Needless to say, I do not recommend this book.