For wherever Historians go, chaos is sure to follow in their wake …“ In Book One, we follow new recruit Max as she rides the catastrophe curve from eleventh-century London to the First World War, and from the Cretaceous Period to the destruction of the Great Library at Alexandria. Behind the strait-laced façade of a conventional academic institution, the secret of time travel is being used for ground-breaking and daring historical research taking the historians on a rollercoaster ride through history: from the destruction of Pompeii to the Normandy trenches from the Great Fire of London to Bronze Age Troy and even to the time of the dinosaurs… Meanwhile, within at St Mary’s itself, there are power struggles and intrigues worthy of a book in themselves. At St Mary’s Institute of Historical Research, the historians don’t just study the past, they revisit it. “Time travel meets history in this explosive, bestselling adventure series.

Looking at this one, the publisher’s blurb suggests that there’s a lot I might like: Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book was one of the first to go on my “50 at 50” list, for example, and is still a regular re-read. I loved most of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, which balanced absurdity with literary intelligence, Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (though it has dated since I first read it) and in my opinion Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels are about as skilful as you can get in the genre (or at least the ones I have read.)Īlso on the positive side is the point that I do like a good alternate history or time travel story.

(It is used in the book, too.)īut here’s the thing – when such books work, they work well. Mary’s as they hurtle around History…” “Disaster magnets”… yuck. It also doesn’t help that the blurb at the bottom of the front cover made me wince – “Meet the disaster magnets of St. With that in mind, this is a novel that by taking on both of these aspects is possibly the worst I could choose to read. They are the most personal of elements for a reader, and I know to my own cost that what works for one reader can leave another remarkably unimpressed. (Well, actually, names can be a deal breaker, sometimes.) No – the two things that work, or don’t, for me are humour and romance. And whilst characterisation, setting, internal logic and appropriate names are all very important, it’s none of those. I’ve often said on the SFFWorld Forums that there are two elements that can make or break a novel for me.

“History is just one damned thing after another.” Arnold Toynbee