Finally, I have gotten around to reviewing Time Travel for Beginners by Jaclyn Moriarty. I finished reading it about six weeks ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. It is a more light-hearted time-travel story than I usually read.
The novel is set in a near-future Sydney, Australia. Anna, a single mum, finally tires of her overbearing retail boss and quits. She then tries out for a business called the Time Travel Agency. Much to her surprise, she gets the job.
Three other staff work there, with a mostly absent, mysterious owner/manager. They seem to believe the time travel is actually real, but Anna thinks it is just very clever virtual reality created from a huge database. If it were real, she would go back in time and prevent an accident that injured her daughter. Anna is asked to create her time-travel tours for clients. As an English literature major, she uses the time-travel booths to research famous authors like Jane Austen and create literature time tours for clients.
One of those clients is Teddy, whose recently married wife has left him. He wants to time-travel into the past to find out where he went wrong with his estranged wife. Much of Teddy’s story is told through amusing blokey text messages between him and two friends as they discuss his marriage breakup and future dating prospects.
A third main character is a woman who is gifted a writing mentorship with one-on-one classes conducted in an office above the time-travel business. Her mentor asks her to keep a journal, which she writes under the pseudonym of Jade Giovane.
About two-thirds of the way through the novel, I wondered if I had missed the real name of Jade Giovane, and actually went looking for it, but I was to discover later that the author had deliberately kept Jade’s background secret.
The novel is very well written. Its prose flows in short chapters told from the alternating viewpoints of the three main characters. Those viewpoints are often interrupted by amusing client reviews of the business. Many of them are not complimentary.
Most time-travel stories warn of creating paradoxes if the past is changed. For example, Marty McFly risks erasing himself if his mother falls for him when he goes back to the past in Back to the Future. The author of Time Travel for Beginners avoids this paradox by having every trip to the past create a branching time-path, with the traveller returning to their unchanged timeline, until…
Moriarty is an Australian author I hadn’t heard of before, perhaps because she lived in the US for many years before returning to Australia. She previously mostly wrote young adult fiction.
I really enjoyed this frequently amusing novel, which is much more light-hearted than what I usually read. Whether you are a science fiction fan or not, you should enjoy the whimsy of Time Travel for Beginners.