From the Bookshelf of Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge…

When we smash-cut to black (heh) at the end of the last book, our heroes had all finally crossed paths

When we smash-cut to black (heh) at the end of the last book, our heroes had all finally crossed paths with one another, and come to the awful realization that the drops to Oxford weren’t working. They spend much of the first part of the novel comparing notes, and realizing that, thanks to the slippage, all three of them may have altered events -- each historian worries that he/she alone could be responsible for the Allies losing the war. Mike untangled the propeller and rescued Lieutenant Hardy at Dunkirk; Eileen prevented two of her evacuees from leaving the East End; and Polly may have committed any number of small actions, simply by being in 1941 longer than necessary and interacting with so many different people. What follows is a lot of reconnaissance -- trying to locate other historians who may have been in London during 1941 (regardless of the year they may have left from Oxford), trying to determine if there are any noticeable discrepancies in events (which is made more difficult by the fact that misinformation and false reports were a contributing factor to the Allied victory). And also theater rehearsals. Many, many pages of tedious theater rehearsals. Polly is still with the crew she met on her first night in the Blitz, and they’re still calling themselves a theatre troupe and putting on plays -- it’s interesting from a character development standpoint, I suppose, and it plays a role in the endgame (albeit a tertiary one, and it’s a doozy of a stretch, in my opinion), but I wanted there to be more of a payoff. (view spoiler)[Polly seems to think Sir (can I just say that Game of Thrones has ruined me on nobility titles? It bothered me for 1200 pages that it’s not “Ser”) Godfrey knew all along she was a time traveler -- I wanted him to turn out to be an historian in the end as well. I suppose there could have been a cheesy “You’ve had the power to get home all along” quality to that sort of reveal, which is why Willis avoided it. But then again, the ending itself is sort of cheesy as it is. (hide spoiler)]

We also catch up with Colin, who is still not the protagonist, no matter what either cover blurb will lead you to believe, but he’s still searching for Polly and Eileen across the years. I actually wish we’d seen a little more of his search and less of Polly’s rehearsals and Mike’s various extracurriculars. (view spoiler)[Can I just say I felt so dumb not realizing Mike was Ernest in Blackout? Like...duh. It was obvious by the end of Blackout that Mary was Polly, but we saw so little of Ernest in the first book. His chapters were still dull, however. I’m not sure how you can turn espionage into a snoozer, but there you go. Mike/Ernest is just sort of a charisma void, as a character, and given that he only realizes in the last few minutes of his life that he hasn’t irreparably fucked up the timeline...I wanted him to figure it out sooner and stop sucking the life out of everything with his despair. He’s a little like Angel in the first few episodes of Buffy: “Waah, waah, poor me, the weight of the world is on my shoulders and mine alone. No one has suffered like I have suffered, blee blah bloo.” There’s just an absence of anything else in that character, he exists solely to bemoan the fact that he couldn’t save Eileen and Polly (and plus it’s painfully dull to watch him write fake newspaper articles). (hide spoiler)] I also had issues with the characterization of Eileen. I get that she’s supposed to be younger than the others (the evacuated children were her first assignment), but the entire time, the other two treat her not just with kid gloves, but as though she needs to wear a helmet to avoid hurting herself. She’s sort of flighty, yes, but not actually stupid, and it bugs me that Mike and Polly expect her to have perfect recall of every conversation she may ever have observed between historians, because she was apparently supposed to intuit that it would be important months later. She’s just treated as very simple, and it bothered me, because to me, she didn’t read as a simpleton. The constant withholding of information got old really fast too, might I add. Mike and Polly spend the first two hundred or so pages NOT telling Eileen everything they know, on the grounds that they don’t want to upset her (because in addition to being simple, apparently she’s fragile, because we aren’t hitting enough stereotypes at once!). It bothered me on Lost when no one talked to each other or asked questions, and it bothers me when this happens in books, because 99.9% of the time, it’s a stall tactic. Kate and Jack refuse to share information with Sawyer because the writers haven’t figured out their convoluted mythology yet. And Polly and Mike aren’t telling Eileen everything they know because we still have 500 pages of book left! Bah. Quit stalling and get to the point.

Ultimately, the ending is satisfying, and the time travel logic mostly doesn’t make my head hurt. We get a different understanding of the whole “slippage” concept here as well (view spoiler)[ at first Mr. Dunworthy (who managed to find a functioning drop and make it to 1941, so he’s poked holes in his own theory already) tells Polly that it’s a safeguard against alterations -- the drops have shut down so the continuum can repair itself, thanks to the damage historians have caused. The two believe, erroneously it turns out, that the timeline will repair itself by undoing any damage they have caused, i.e., killing everyone they’ve ever come into contact with, because thanks to Polly/Mr. D./Mike/everyone else -- lots of people are alive who shouldn’t be. So Polly spends about 200 pages running around trying to be a coldhearted bitch (which she sucks at) in an attempt to drive people away so they won’t get close enough to her to be killed by the timeline’s self-defense, or whatever. THEN, about 200 pages later, Polly nearly dies in a V1 explosion, manages to save Sir Godfrey, and has some sort of memory trip/hallucination, wherein she realizes the real real function of slippage. For real this time:
”I think we may have been wrong about why they’re not opening, and about the slippage. What if it’s not to prevent us from altering the course of history? What if it’s to put us where we can? To keep us here until we do?”
It’s a little cheesy, but it’s a good deal more optimistic than typical time travel logic! In 11/22/63 we have the opposite -- the past actively resists being changed. So many forces conspire to keep Jake away from situations where he could have the potential to alter the past (what these folks refer to as “divergence points,” I believe). When he actually saves Kennedy, he rips a literal hole in the space time continuum, and he has to go back and reset, knowing exactly what he will lose in the process (and what others will lose too). Here, there’s a bit of a safer way out -- the past is NOT obdurate (I had to), and the historians in fact have to be there in order to make their small, war-winning alterations. As Polly assures Mr. Dunworthy, they didn’t lose the war, “It was always won because we had always come. We were always here. We were always a part of it.” And this? This right here is why time travel still ultimately makes my head hurt. Colin goes to collect Polly at the theater, and he only knows where to find her because Binnie (not Eileen) told him in 1995, which occured before he went to 1941. And when Binnie sees him in 1995, she knows that this is when he learns where Polly is, and she knows it because she remembers him being there in 1941, so he had to have figured it out, since it already happened, and ouch. (hide spoiler)] I mean, at least we aren’t mucking about with multiple timelines and alternate universes. It could be so much worse (ahem, Vortex...and also Shadow of Night, because that is just the laziest excuse for time travel I have ever read).

Overall I would say this is just shy of 4 stars. I had too many issues with character and structure to give it a full 4, especially since it’s so hard to evaluate these books separately. Plus, I read them back to back, and I’m already sort of forgetting what happened in which book! I do with the structure had been more...balanced? I realize that as it’s set up, it would be nearly impossible to go the “all of the story for some of the characters route,” a la A Feast for Crows...even if book 2 was entirely Colin’s story, so much of it is wrapped up in what happens to the others. Though I stand by my assessment that I’d rather have heard more from Colin than we did -- he turns out to be rather important and we barely get to know him. But I’m not at all sorry that I got myself into this 1200 page commitment, and it’s actually made me want to check out more of Willis’s work.