A Review of Mike Chen’s Here and Now and Then (Mira, 2019)

Posted by: sorayaz

A Review of Mike Chen’s Here and Now and Then (Mira, 2019)
By Stephen Hong Sohn

This title is one of my guilty pleasure reads for 2019 simply because it deploys one of my favorite narrative conceits: time travel!! As soon as I saw that there was a time travel element to this book, I picked it out and read it. I finished it in one sitting. Definitely binge-reading worthy from that perspective.

In any case, here’s B&N with some background for us: “Kin Stewart is an everyday family man: working in IT, trying to keep the spark in his marriage, struggling to connect with his teenage daughter, Miranda. But his current life is a far cry from his previous career…as a time-traveling secret agent from 2142. Stranded in suburban San Francisco since the 1990s after a botched mission, Kin has kept his past hidden from everyone around him, despite the increasing blackouts and memory loss affecting his time-traveler’s brain. Until one afternoon, his ‘rescue’ team arrives—eighteen years too late. Their mission: return Kin to 2142, where he’s only been gone weeks, not years, and where another family is waiting for him. A family he can’t remember. Torn between two lives, Kin is desperate for a way to stay connected to both. But when his best efforts threaten to destroy the agency and even history itself, his daughter’s very existence is at risk. It’ll take one final trip across time to save Miranda—even if it means breaking all the rules of time travel in the process. A uniquely emotional genre-bending debut, Here and Now and Then captures the perfect balance of heart, playfulness, and imagination, offering an intimate glimpse into the crevices of a father’s heart and its capacity to stretch across both space and time to protect the people that mean the most.”

This description does a very good job of the set up: you can see the problem. Once Kin goes “back to the future,” he attempts to integrate into his old life, but realizes that he can’t stop thinking about the wife and daughter he left beyond. The speculative dimensions of this fictional world offer Kin some useful tools: for instance, because time traveling problems have occurred in the past, there are some treatments to reverse some of the aging that Kin has experienced. Nevertheless, he’s much older than his fiancé at this point, and he begins to wonder if he even loves her anymore after what, for him, is so much time away. Here’s where I provide your requisite spoiler warning: look away now, unless you want to find out about the plot!

So, what Kin does is finds a loophole so he can communicate with his daughter back in time. When he discovers that she comes to a premature death (due in part because of what she thinks is Kin’s abandonment of her), he decides to try to communicate with her prior to that point and alter the course of her life. Though he successfully does so, he also inadvertently enables her to have the opportunity to publish materials that will later make it clear that time traveling is even possible at a far earlier point in history. This change in events makes her a temporal anomaly, one that the agency Kin works for would attempt to blot out, which means that Kin’s daughter’s life is at stake!

Though some of the elements of the novel seemed rushed (for instance, though set in SF, I got no sense of the city’s vast and diverse population at all), the conclusion does have a couple of key twists and turns that make it very satisfying. There is a moment that reminded me very much of Tuck Everlasting, one of my favorite books from when I was a kid. Here and Now and Then’s strong conclusion makes it again my favorite guilty pleasure read for 2019. Recommended for any fans of the young adult paranormal genre.

Buy the Book Here!

Review Author: Stephen Hong Sohn
Review Editor: Gnei Soraya Zarook

If you have any questions or want us to consider your book for review, please don’t hesitate to contact us via email!
Prof. Stephen Hong Sohn at ssohnucr@gmail.com
Gnei Soraya Zarook, PhD Student in English, at gzaro001@ucr.edu 

comments