I'll be honest. This is a case where the story on the pages just wasn't as interesting as the premise would lead you to believe, and I'll try to explain why.
Dorothy wakes up in 1954 on a transport bus bound for Hanover State Psychiatric Hospital. She has no memory of who she is, but the one thing she does know is that she isn’t Dorothy. She has visions of a future where she’s someone named Bix sent back to 1954 on a mission to save the world. But the longer she's held at Hanover, the more she is forced into believing she is Dorothy. So which version in her mind is real—Dorothy or Bix?
That’s a cool premise, right? There's so much potential here, so many different ways this story could've unfolded that's both brilliant and riveting. But unfortunately, none of those things happened and what we end up with is surprisingly banal.
One of the major problems here is that we spend too long in Dorothy's head as she's subjected to endless psychiatric treatments while trying to puzzle out the question of whether she’s really from the future. Now, this would've been more interesting to us readers if we shared the same puzzle, but we don't. We know she's from the future because otherwise, what kind of pointless nonstory would this be? She'd just be a mental patient making everything up, which could be a story, but not this one because this one's billed as sci-fi. So it’s clear to us what's going on right from the beginning even if it’s not clear to Dorothy, but we still have to stick around for 200 pages while she figures it out.
But that's fine. I'm not against a long setup if it means the payoff is spectacular. But here again, it was inexplicably disappointing. Instead of choosing to flesh out the sci-fi and speculative elements of this book (the whole reason I'm reading this), we choose to focus on one action scene after another—of running, crouching, hiding, dodging—interspersed with the sort of all tell no show infodump that makes me want to abandon reading as a hobby.
Tabula Rasa, Reckoner, Reclamation, The Guest, New Covenant—it all certainly sounds impressive, I'll give you that. But just because you name some simple concepts with important sounding words doesn’t make it any more compelling, and that’s never been more true than here. While the terms might sound fancy, I can’t help but feel that they’re thinly veiled disguises for just how poorly sketched out the future really is.
Then there is Dorothy, secret agent extraordinaire, except she keeps messing things up during crucial moments. She needs to slowly walk across the field to avoid attention? Oh no, she panics and breaks into a run and everyone notices. She has the key and just needs to get to the door and escape? Oh no, she accidentally screams and alerts everyone. She has to read a secret message on a piece of paper and then destroy it? Oh no, she leaves it face up across the room for all to see. Like, come on! What kind of dumb fuckery is that.
But it wasn't that bad, if you can believe it. Even with my long list of complaints, this somehow managed to remain a three-star read until almost the very end. At that point, we are hit with the most lazy non-ending I have ever come across. One of the final lines of this book is Dorothy asking herself:
Will I be able to pull it off? . . . Don't know.
And that's the end, ladies and gentlemen. Like what the heck! Where is the payoff, the resolution, the closure? I'm having a hard time believing this isn't some sort of joke, but no, it's all written there in black and white, clear as day. So yeah, I'm going to have to deduct a star for that.
It took me a bit, but towards the end, I finally figured out what was so off about this story. It's constructed like the pilot of a tv series. Each scene is there for maximum tension, all the while not actually giving you much nor moving the plot forward. It tries to stretch the thinnest of plotlines into the most number of episodes, and it even ends on a cliffhanger just to entice you back. No, thank you.
Readaroo Rating: 2 stars
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