Just One Damned Thing After Another (The Chronicles of St Mary's, #1) in Crazy Challenge Connection

Nov 10, 2024 Catsalive rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2024, discovery

A bit of a confused mess at times, just one damned thing after another, & it took me a while to settle into it, however, there were some amusing moments that kept me reading & I enjoyed it, on the whole.

I mostly felt irritation with Max, who must be, what, 30ish, if she has her doctorate, going on 15, & keeps drifting off when people are speaking to her - not old enough to be an eccentric professor, not young enough to get away with it. There are a lot of characters that can be hard to keep tra ...more

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Sep 06, 2022 Rachel N. rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: series, humor, time-travel, science-fiction, historical-fiction, read-in-2022

Madeleine Maxwell, Max to her friends, is recruited to be historian at St Mary's doing historical research, which in this case involves time travel. The book follows Max on several trips including to WWI and the Cretaceous. I liked Max and the crew at St Marys. The book was funny. The timeline doesn't make sense in some parts, yes I know time travel but I'm talking about parts set in the "present". At one point Max is supposed to be at St Marys for 5 years and I'm thinking if that's the case the ...more

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Aug 04, 2019 Chris rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: time-travel, fiction, series, england

2.5 stars
I really wanted to like this book more than I did. Which is not to say I did not like it. There are some really great ideas here - but they've done much better by Connie Willis. This book is a mile wide and about an inch deep. We just jump around from one damned thing to another. And then Taylor does the truly unforgivable and breaks her own rules of time travel. There will be spoilers.

St. Mary's is a triple-super-secret place in England where researchers have developed time machines t 2.5 stars
I really wanted to like this book more than I did. Which is not to say I did not like it. There are some really great ideas here - but they've done much better by Connie Willis. This book is a mile wide and about an inch deep. We just jump around from one damned thing to another. And then Taylor does the truly unforgivable and breaks her own rules of time travel. There will be spoilers.

St. Mary's is a triple-super-secret place in England where researchers have developed time machines that allow them to go back and find out what really happened at various points in history. Not only are they careful not to interfere with the past, but they've found it's impossible to bring things from the past back with them to the present. So, it's all good - until of course it isn't.

"Max" Maxwell is the typical heroine you expect to find in a book like this - everything she touches seems to turn into a disaster that she's always able to pull out of at the last minute. Her compatriots are a motley crew of people who seem equally intent on screwing or screwing one another over. The best part of the book is when they have to deal with the St. Mary's version of Delores Umbridge. Taylor goes for lightheartedness at the oddest moment.

But here's the real problem: While these guys are so careful about not affecting history - there's this other rival group of "evil" time travelers who don't seem to have any such compunctions. Hell, they're bringing safari groups back to the Cretaceous to hunt dinosaurs. And they keep showing up at other points in time. You gotta figure at some point one of them did more than just step on a butterfly.

Then the folks at St. Mary's discover they can bring things to the present as long as they couldn't possibly still exist in this time period (i.e., any object that would have definitely been destroyed in an earlier time). So that sets them off on a mission to rescue documents from the Library at Alexandria (already ablaze when they arrive), which they will put in amphora in a place where they can be dug up in a couple of millennia. So they've completely thrown out their own moral compass.

This is the first in a six-book series, so there are clearly a lot of people who much have like them. Me. I'm not saying I wouldn't read another if there were nothing else around. But, meh. ...more

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Jul 22, 2017 Charlotte (Buried in Books) rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I bloody loved this book. It's the perfect combination of humour and drama and I just want more of it.

While a lot of first in series spend time with the world building to the detriment of the story - this book didn't suffer and the action cracks along at a wonderful pace.

Although it reads like it's set in the present there are a couple of things that make you wonder - several time's its mentioned that America has closed its borders, so it could be slightly in the future.

Either way this book intr ...more

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Jul 21, 2020 LynnB rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, humor, time-travel, romance, 2020-reads

A fun and adventurous time-travel extravaganza that careens wildly between time periods. I enjoyed the story and might try one more of the series to see if I want to continue.

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