Chanticleer Book Reviews

Tag: time travel

  • The ALEXANDRITE: A HOLLYWOOD TIME-TRAVEL NOIR by Rick Lenz – Magic Realism, Hollywood, Time Travel

    The ALEXANDRITE: A HOLLYWOOD TIME-TRAVEL NOIR by Rick Lenz – Magic Realism, Hollywood, Time Travel

    Time-travel Noir becomes High Art with a wicked sense of humor in this fast-paced novel that offers up alternate views of Hollywood’s past and present.

    Washed-out and with the doors of opportunity slamming shut on all sides, actor Jack Cade is the poster boy for the “bad things happen in threes” mantra. Getting cut from a crappy, no-pay play was just the tip of his career-crushing iceberg. His agent, who lost faith in Jack way back in another epoch, manages to dig up a temporary life preserver – an audition for a part that has Jack written all over it. An audition he misses. And Jack’s wife, no longer able to stay afloat in his sinkhole of alcohol and “bleeding actor’s ego,” jumps ship.

    Just when it starts looking like it’s lights-out for Jack, an anonymous envelope lands in his mailbox. Inside is a pawn ticket that leads him to an Alexandrite ring and a psycho-physicist who claims to hold the secret of time travel. With Jack’s personal and professional lives collapsing in on him like a black hole, he walks out of 1996 and into the heyday of mid-Century Hollywood. He also walks into another man’s shoes, not to mention the scene of his recurring nightmare. Armed with “fore-knowledge” Jack has a chance to make things right in two different time periods. The only question is, how many times will he have to jump across the spectrum of an alternate reality to get it right?

    Drawing from his extensive experience in the entertainment industry, author Rick Lenz delivers a stellar and believable cast of characters. From Jack Cade, whose love-hate relationship with the movie industry keeps him on the razor’s edge of failure, to Jack’s 1956 incarnation – or possibly alter-ego – Richard Blake, a movie-star handsome gemologist, whose an angry alcoholic wife and sultry, mentally impaired sister-in-law set the stage for their own rendition of a sweaty Tennessee Williams play. And there’s the incomparably complex, multi-faceted Marilyn Monroe, at the peak of her career—the golden thread that weaves everyone’s story together.

    Steeped in Hollywood history and culture, The Alexandrite  entices the reader with snippets of iconic set locations, facades, meeting places, studios, and stars. But the novel is more than a torch song to the movie industry. It is also a paean to hard-working actors whose careers, like Jack’s, straddle a razor.

    Somerset Grand Prize award winner for Literary and Contemporary Fiction along with multiple other literary awards, The Alexandrite by Rick Lenz playfully challenges the reader to ask questions about a world that exists outside of the four dimensions in which we live. A must-read for anyone and everyone who has been touched by the magic of Hollywood.

    5 Star Best Book Chanticleer Reviews round silver sticker

  • The GRAVITATIONAL LEAP by Darrell Lee – Post-Apocalyptic, Time-Travel, Action Adventure

    The GRAVITATIONAL LEAP by Darrell Lee – Post-Apocalyptic, Time-Travel, Action Adventure

    In a grim, cold future world, a small elite group guards a treasure from another time in hopes they can somehow rewrite the past, even at the cost of their own lives.

    Timo is a sharpshooter who, with his wife Alyd, guards the Tower, a bizarre ancient building in the center of their small realm where rulers live and ancient secrets are kept.

    When Timo shoots down a nomadic intruder trying to penetrate the fortress, he finds an unusually beautiful knife among the dead man’s possessions and chooses to steal it for himself. When the knife’s true owner is revealed, Timo is not in danger as he and Alyd feared, but instead will be invited into the Tower’s elite circle.

    Timo, Alyd and her mother Wen move into the Tower where he will work for the chief government official, Maldor. He is assigned to transcribe books from a time more than 500 years before, when their planet was not desolate and desperate—1963. This work, and what Maldor reveals to him privately, will shatter Timo and Alyd’s illusions; “the Great Plague” that they were taught about in school was something far more cataclysmic and sinister, bringing widespread death to a once-thriving planet.

    Meanwhile, the nomadic tribes tired of being without electricity amass outside the Tower’s fortress, led by Maldor’s estranged son who rules by visions, signs and the immediacy of weather-related food shortages, to plan a surprise attack. They will storm and possibly destroy the Tower, little knowing its potential for the preservation of mankind. The masses blame Maldor’s crack-pot scientific theories for their plight and are insistent on battle. Only the sudden bursting of a distant star and the skills of Timo’s marksmanship can save the world…but to save it, everything Timo has ever known must disappear.

    A debut novel by author Darrell Lee whose experience in the International Space Station informs the science behind this action-packed story, The Gravitational Leap is a bold but rational foray into the worlds of science and pseudoscience, a mix of nuclear weaponry, Einstein’s theories, and the always intriguing notion of time travel.

    It is important to note that this is a post-apocalyptic story and not a dystopian. With believable characters and a mind-tickling premise: What if history could be reversed to avert a worldwide apocalypse?

    Lee’s book also encompasses a touching romance, and the question of personal religious belief and its place in a society that longs for salvation. The characters recite Bible verses throughout the work. More could have been done to delineate presumed ethnic differences in the future world, quicken the pacing of the battle scenes, and there are long passages from a twentieth century submarine’s log that would have been better presented as dialog or broken up in another manner. There are instances where characters are introduced to further the plot, then disappear again. Yet, this is an intriguing work with logical concepts balanced by plenty of excitement and a surprise ending.

    In a gripping tale that blends historical fact and scientific speculation, the hero of The Gravitational Leap must risk all to end the desperation of a failing civilization and spark the chance for a global reawakening.

  • The Other Side of Life by Andy Kutler – World War II/Civil War, Time Travel

    The Other Side of Life by Andy Kutler – World War II/Civil War, Time Travel

    The Other Side of Life by the first-time author Andy Kutler will take you by surprise. This time-spanning book covers two major wars in United States history: World War II and the Civil War – but not how you might think. Kutler pulls this off with an intriguing storyline and well-orchestrated action sequences that put us in place and time.

    The story opens on the deck of the battleship Nevada, part of the U.S Naval fleet on December 7th, 1941. The Japanese fighters rip apart the battleships moored in place. During the attack, Commander Malcolm (Mac) Kelsey is severely wounded – and this is where the story gets interesting.

    Kelsey encounters a certain Mr. Leavitt who offers him a choice: stay right where he is in his broken condition; or, go somewhere else – a place known as The Other Side of Life – where all of his memories are wiped clean. A do-over, if you will.

    Kelsey chooses the latter, but this other side of life is no better – and in some respects worse – than before. He’s fighting for the Union Army in the Civil War. But something has gone wrong: he has retained all of his memories, making him a man outside his own time.

    For four years Kelsey fights for the Union Army, and throughout this period, he struggles (understandably so) with trying to make sense of why he is where he is, and how this all come to be. Upon the conclusion of the war, Kelsey encounters Mr. Kelsey again and faces another choice.

    That choice is perhaps the most interesting and most jarring aspect of the book. The author never does explain quite where it is that Kelsey has gone. A brilliant move! Any reader having even the slightest bit of religious background or spiritual awareness will quickly associate this with heaven – or maybe purgatory – or even nirvana. Using this ambiguous device enables readers to ponder questions like, what would they do in a similar circumstance – the same thing, or maybe something different?

    A captivating historical military story that blends genres and crosses through time and space. Kutler has a flare for describing situations at hand – his descriptions of the Pearl Harbor attack are impeccable – and he brings in multiple characters to help the story unfold. The story may be a  bit unwieldy at times, but in the end, Kutler manages it well even providing an unexpected twist making The Other Side of Life is a satisfying and worthy read. Highly recommended.

  • TIME TRAVEL TRAILER by Karen Musser Nortman – a quick fun read to take you on an armchair vacation

    TIME TRAVEL TRAILER by Karen Musser Nortman – a quick fun read to take you on an armchair vacation

    When Lynne McBrier acquires a vintage camping trailer, she can’t imagine that her camping trips will be journeys not just to new places, but to former times.

    Struggling to raise rebellious teenaged daughter Dinah after separating from her husband Kurt, Lynne buys the 1937 camper on impulse from her old friend Ben, who used it to take trips with his now deceased wife, Minnie. Dinah, who like most adolescent girls considers anything her mother wants her to do as boring, agrees reluctantly to go on one sentimental weekend camping trip before Lynne converts the trailer into an office.

    It’s pretty cozy as Lynne and Dinah settle into a local campground and tuck in for the night. But when they wake up, things around them have changed—there are no big trees, no paved roads, and the large cement bathhouse is gone, in its place, two wooden outhouses.

    They are forced to realize that, impossible as it seems, the trailer has transported them back in time; people talk to them about their fear of Russian spies, and everyone is dressed in outmoded costumes. Certain clues to the transformation allow them to reverse the process and return to 2014. They agree not to talk about their misadventure.

    But Lynne secretly takes a time trip on her own and Dinah wants to visit the past once more, having become obsessed with classic books about time travel. Each jump lands them in a different portion of the twentieth century. Lynne tries to get the truth about the trailer from Ben, but he is in hospital, raving incomprehensibly about Minnie. Then Lynne and Kurt are forced together to test the mysteries of time travel when Dinah goes missing, almost certainly carried away by the camper.

    Author Karen Musser Nortman has cleverly constructed this fantasy with many small but important particulars. Mother and daughter, whose testy relationship is realistically portrayed, visit a vintage store to get mid-century clothes and add an old-fashioned radio and other details to the camper so they’ll seem plausible to people they encounter in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. Reminders of historical events—teen hobos in the Great Depression, Roger Bannister’s four-minute mile, the McCarthy hearings—contribute authenticity to the story, while touches like the strong family similarity in appearance and rebellious temperament between Dinah and her then teen-aged ancestor add poignancy.

    Well-drawn characters, tight plotting and the alluring possibility of returning to, and possibly changing, the past make The Time Travel Trailer an engaging, mind-tickling trip makes for a fun armchair vacation.

     

  • CATENAE by S.E. Curtis

    CATENAE by S.E. Curtis

    Debut author S. E. Curtis has penned an intriguing science fiction novel about one family’s fight to defend  humanity’s natural timeline. The family, consisting of two generations of noble fighters, has been tasked with guarding the time continuum of all reality, ensuring that no one can alter it in such a way to change the course of history.

    The story begins in present day, when beautiful, young Tamara Decaire, a second-generation Family member, is injured in a battle against her enemy.  She quickly time-travels back to a present-day hospital ER for treatment. Danny Nolan, an ER surgeon who works the night shift, struggles to save her life. Though her unusual wounds don’t appear to be fatal, she is also presenting symptoms of some type of toxic poisoning. He makes a risky decision to treat her as if she has been poisoned, thus saving her life. However, in the process he has temporarily damaged the tiny nano-processors inside her body that give her the extraordinary powers she uses to fight her galactic enemies.

    Upon awakening, Tamara realizes that her ability to fight off her assassin is temporarily weakened. She enlists the help of Danny to get her out of the hospital and moved to a location where she can recover. Thus begins a race against Time to identify Tamara’s powerful, elusive enemies, in which Danny travels into the future and to other planets with the aid of Tamara’s Family members.

    S.E. Curtis has written an action-filled adventure that is sure to engage science fiction readers. The author describes a world built on the fascinating premise that all of history is connected, in a cause and effect continuum, back to the origins of reality itself. Those continuums, called catenae, must be protected against any type of modification. The Family, whose members squabble and fight in engagingly human ways, must ensure that no catena is altered in such a way that it changes the course of history. To do that, they must guard their own catena, to ensure their own survival and thus the survival of Reality itself.

    The author seems to have left open the possibility of more books, making Catenae, hopefully, the first novel in what should become a very popular series.

    Warning of Adult Content: This novel contains non-graphic depictions of rape and torture that may offend some readers. There is a description of repeated rape and torture of the main character in exposition, in the first part of the book. However, the events are not graphically depicted, just told.

  • An Editorial Review of “The Inscription” by Pam Binder

    An Editorial Review of “The Inscription” by Pam Binder

    Feisty and independent Amber MacPhee has a good teaching job, loving family, and nothing in the least messy, like love, to complicate things. But Amber finds herself smack in the middle of the biggest mess she’s ever been in after she crashes her car into Loch Ness and travels over 400 years into the past. The Inscription by Pam Binder is a heartwarming and sweet romance set in 1500’s Scotland.

    It’s Lachlan MacAlpin, immortal and laird of Urquhart Castle, who rescues Amber from the freezing waters of Loch Ness. He fears she will die like the many others he has pulled from the lake, but it quickly becomes clear that Amber will survive. As he pulls her from the Loch, Lachlan cannot help but notice that Amber, with her hair of “burnished gold” bears an uncanny resemblance to the woman of legend who will possess the knowledge of future generations and lead an immortal man away from the path of darkness.

    As Amber slowly allows herself to realize that she has not merely crashed her car and woken in the middle of an extremely dedicated historical reenactment, that she has in fact, woken up 400 years in the past, she faces an unprecedented set of challenges. She must learn what her place is in this alien world and try to find a way home. An explanation for her sudden appearance is quickly settled upon when Lachlan decides that the best way to keep her safe is to introduce her as his betrothed. As much as Amber hates the idea of relying on a man and false pretense to keep her identity safe, she cannot help but notice Lachlan’s broad shoulders and thick Scottish brogue.

    Amber tries to relax into her new environment and keep her head down while she tries to find a way back to her own time, but old habits die hard. She challenges Lachlan left and right, becomes the tutor to Lachlan’s younger brother, Gavin, and attracts the attention of more than a few men. She fears that there may not be a way for her to go home when she begins to suspect that she is not the first to travel back to this time.

    As Amber recovers and struggles to make sense of her sudden leap through time, Lachlan has his own battles to face. First, his lifelong enemy Subedei is closing in, and word is that he plans to attack and kill the MacAlpin’s for the punishment they bestowed upon him over a hundred years ago. Second, he feels the bloodlust that drove his father mad creeping ever closer and he is terrified of being possessed by it.

    Despite the challenges they face, Amber and Lachlan begin spending time together and soon get glimpses of each other through the walls they have each built around their hearts. Life moves on at a normal pace even as battle creeps closer to the castle. Are they the two the legend speaks of? Can Amber learn to love a man who may never grow old and die? And can Lachlan accept the healing power of love before Amber is sent back to her time, never to return?

    The Inscription is a heartwarming romance with more than one good twist at the end. Readers will find themselves rooting for not only Amber and Lachlan, but the solid cast of characters that supports this novel. This is truly a story of legendary love that spans the ages.

  • An Editorial Review of “Foresight” by Deen Ferrell

    An Editorial Review of “Foresight” by Deen Ferrell

    Willoughby Von Brahmer hates high school, feels restless at home, and fumbles awkwardly around girls, yet is fascinated by the charismatic celebrity violinist his own age, Sydney Senoya. He seems like a pretty typical sixteen-year-old. But when the reader begins to untangle the mysterious web of Foresight, it becomes clear that Willoughby’s life is anything but typical. Foresight is Deen Ferrell’s artful and ambitious first Cryptic Spaces novel.

    Willoughby’s quasi-ordinary life begins to unravel during a routine visit to the barber. Not so ordinary, really: Willoughby is a math prodigy who at twelve solved The Riemann Hypothesis, a puzzle that had stumped mathematicians for centuries. His barber, Antonio Santanos Eldoro Chavez, has extraordinary expertise in architecture. All vestiges of routine evaporate when, during his haircut, Willoughby spies a string of glowing numbers suspended in the air in the corner of Antonio’s shop. Then, everything in the shop freezes except Willoughby himself and a skeletal-faced man appears, nods to Willoughby, and then just as quickly disappears leaving Willoughby shaken but intrigued.

    The story picks its way deliberately through Willoughby’s gradual discovery of a secret society of time travelers, Observations, Inc., apparently headed by the brilliant yet cryptic Hathaway Simon (H. S.), with the support of the enigmatic Sam, who Willoughby has known for years as his family’s chauffeur. Willoughby signs on to join a team of handpicked savants who will explore time itself, but soon learns that Observations, Inc. is not alone in the time-travel business – and their competitors are far less benign.

    The story kicks into high gear during Observations, Inc.’s initial team-building exercise on a “cruise” ship with unusual capabilities, where Willoughby and Antonio meet the talented and mercurial Sydney, as well as James Arthur, an aura-reading healer, and T. K., the cabin girl who, like Sam, is more than she seems. Before the cruise ship’s team embarks on their first mission, a gang of supernatural crooks stages a mutiny.

    Ferrell’s gifted descriptions, from Sydney’s music to the experience of time travel, bring the story to life. The cast of characters is deftly drawn and admirably diverse. Some younger readers may find the density of the plot daunting, but others will revel in the richness of the history and science brought to the subject of time travel and prognostication.

    As the Observation, Inc. team’s voyage of exploration becomes a battle for survival, Willoughby, Sydney and their friends realize they are bound together by more than curiosity. They need each other’s talents, commitment, and compassion if they are to get through time and space alive. Foresight is a rich and complex YA sci-fi story.

     Cryptic Spaces: Book One: Foresight earned  a First in Category position in the Dante Rossetti Awards for Young Adult Fiction, a division of Chanticleer Blue Ribbon Writing Competitions.