My first thought when reading Kate Mascarenhas’s The Psychology of Time Travel was I bet this is her first novel. Then, as this is a published work, why wasn’t the editor harsher? The amount of telling, not showing, became a real stinker for me. Likewise the jumps in PoV. Both mistakes are easily made, but they should also be mistakes easily corrected.
That said, this was a good book. Most time travel books have a predictable set of characters – predominately male with the odd women for a love interest. This was the opposite – almost entirely a female cast (IMHO a bit too much so – varying the cast adds dimension that can create story arcs).
I think the strength of this book is the thought given to what a world with time travel would look like – how it should be controlled, policed, financed, salaried, etc, and how time travel would affect the attitudes of those involved, seeing yourself in different stages of your life, knowing how and when you would die. What would death mean at all if you could chat with the departed the day after their funeral? This was all very well done (with a few exceptions – the trial being the biggest oddity).
Still, better than a 4, not quite a 5…
Book kindly supplied by Netgalley for an honest review.
See review on Goodreads