Well, this is weird! As a huge JCO fan, one of the things that I love about her is that she's *not* simply re-writing the same book over and over - the variety in her output is hugely impressive. This one, though, is a bit of a puzzle...

It starts as a homage to 1984 with a kind of 'Sovietisation' of the US: acronyms of bureaucratic bodies abound, people can be 'disappeared' and free thought is severely circumscribed. Adriane, our 17 year old narrator, upsets the regime by openly (and naively?) questioning their authority and is punished by being whisked back to university in 1959 Wisconsin...

Cue some 'is that how people lived' scenes (typewriters! hair curlers!) and some interesting wandering down theories of selfhood. JCO seems to be taking a swipe at the plethora of YA dystopias where a young woman falls in insta- love and leads a rebellion: in this book, that 'love' is subjected to a subtle interrogation and the rebellion segues into student politics of the 1960s: anti-nuclear weapons, civil rights. 

But then, things take a surprising turn and the ending reminds us that one of the qualities we love about JCO is her boldness. 

This is an allusive novel: 1984, Stalinism, the Divergent trilogy, The Matrix, Trump's America and the nostalgia for the 1950s when, allegedly, pesky women/non-whites/communists/Jews etc. etc. were kept in their place (even as, ironically, western society was agitating for more inclusive, socially-just ways of being). 

There are places where this feels like it's lost its way; and then, bam, JCO hits us with a revelation that both amuses and also changes everything. I disagree with the early reviews I've seen which peg this as a YA novel: it may have a YA narrator and gesture towards some of the tropes of that genre, but it deconstructs as much as it re-uses and makes productive capital from the interactions. 

This is not JCO at her best and may not be the best place to start if you haven't read her before - but by the end, I was entertained and stimulated by her witty and rather wicked take on contemporary literary trends and modern US politics.

The hazards of time travel is a curious book. I found the initial dystopian  setting interesting and gave a good sense of world building in a future trumpAmerican way, but once the main narrative gets underway in 1959 I became increasingly less engaged. The final third was mildly irritating and I was left unmoved at the end.

I note others refer to it as YA- I hadn’t appreciated this, but feel young adults deserve better.

A story of several parts, hanging together in a rather contrived, unconvincing way, and with characters that didn’t much engage me.  We start with observation of a future totalitarian regime in America - interchangeable, faceless leaders, airbrushed history, strict rules for citizens’ behaviour and close surveillance of their obedience or dissent.  All very ‘1984’ and the part of the book that worked least for me.  I know Adriane is only 17 but, even so, I found her narration clunky, especially as she is supposed to be an unusually free thinker in a highly restricted society.  

Fast forward (or backward) to 1959 in a small Midwest college and I enjoyed this more.  Shared dorm rooms, frat parties, female paraphernalia such as hair rollers and girdles, launderettes, manual typewriters, and smoking everywhere - old-fangled stuff but new to Adriane.  Add in some anti-war protests, some tired old behavioural psychology experiments, a big dollop of romance and stir without much vigour or pace.

The novel was rather too disjointed for me, and lacking subtlety in its messages about behaviour and society, though I thought the ambiguous ending wrapped it up nicely enough.  A disappointment overall, though, as I have enjoyed JCO’s writing in the past, but I wouldn’t rate this as one of her best.

Just about the first thing you see when you open this book is a list of other books by Joyce Carol Oates. There are 41 of them! 41! Plus she also writes under not one but two pseudonyms! Starting in 1964 when I was 3 years old and pouring out of her even since. How, I ask myself, have I got to be almost 58 years old, reading almost continually since I was knee high to a grasshopper and I have not come across any of them?

My thanks to HarperCollins UK via NetGalley for an ARC of this book which I requested as it seemed an ideal chance to finally find out about such a prolific author. I am not quite so sure I would have requested the book if I had realised that it is very much “young adult” in story and tone. As mentioned above, I am far from being a “young adult” and I have to acknowledge that I rarely read that type of book.

Adriane Stohl lives in a dystopian world where those who dare to engage in free thinking are exiled by being ”teletransported” into the past. It is never quite made clear why the state chooses this form of punishment, but I assume it is because it is cheaper than keeping people in prison in your own time. Adriane writes, but never delivers, a speech that asks unpalatable questions and finds herself back in 1959. It would be unfair to say anything further about the plot as that would probably spoil the book for readers, but it (unsurprisingly) involves love. There’s an ending that makes you pause for thought, but it would clearly be wrong of me to discuss that here.

Joyce Carol Oates is also prolific on Twitter. About this book, she tweeted: “If this novel--"Hazards of Time Travel"--had been published before 2016 it would seem like  a dystopian future/sci-fi; now, a just slightly distorted mirroring of actual T***p US sliding, we hope not inexorably, into totalitarianism & white apartheid.”

Most of the book is Adriane’s experiences in exile, but there are often reflections back to the time and place from which she has been exiled. The book opens with an epigraph taken from “Science and Human Behavior” by B. F. Skinner: "A self is simply a device for representing a functionally unified system of responses.". And it is this that the story focuses on. There are multiple references to experiments on both animals and humans investigating the area of free will vs. response to stimuli. Many parallels are drawn between these experiments and the way the totalitarian state watches (and conditions) its people. Adriane seems the kind of feisty young protagonist who inhabits a typical YA novel (at least, what I believe to be typical) as she seeks to assert her “self” against these oppressive rules. Except she isn’t all the time: she goes all weak and feeble in the presence of a man she yearns for. This surprised me and seemed out of character for her. Maybe this is a deliberate thing on the part of the author, but I am not sure I get it.

This is probably a good YA book, but I am not qualified to judge that, as already mentioned. Reading it as an “old adult”, it was OK but I couldn’t get excited about it. The story is rather predictable and the message about the totalitarian state a bit heavy-handed. I didn’t come out of it thinking “I must read more by this author”, which is a shame as it would have given me plenty more books to read if I had! 2.5 stars rounded down to 2 for the disappointment of discovering it was targeted at people 40-50 years younger than me..

My thanks to HarperCollins UK for an ARC via NetGalley.

I requested the ARC as I had seen this book listed as possible early contender for the 2019 Booker and as I understand that the author is a well known and well regarded literary author.  Unfortunately to my disappointment this was a Young Adult novel, and very much at the young end of that market and not one with which I could interact.

The first part of the book posits a totalitarian state, which emerged from the USA as a result of the crackdown on civil liberties arising from the 9/11 attacks.  The protagonist of the novel (and I choose that word carefully as YA novels tend to have protagonists) is Adriane Stohl, already under watch due to her father, a Doctor who has been demoted to a lowly medical job due to subversive behaviour.  When Adrianne – a dangerously unconventional student at a time when conformity and unquestioning obedience is expected – rehearses a mildly questioning speech – she is herself detained and classified as an EI (Exiled Individual) transported into exile – an exile which as the title of the book suggests is actually (backwards) through time to 1950s middle-America.

In the first part of the book JCO (Joyce Carol Oates) in true YA (Young Adult) style describes in a FCW (Fairly Clunky Way) the DFW (Dystopian Fantasy World) she has created – one where the true horror seems to be the number of acronyms.  A typical passage is

“There had been only a few DASTADs—Disciplinary Actions Securing Threats Against Democracy—taken against Pennsboro students in recent years, and these students had all been boys in category ST3 or below. (The highest ST—SkinTone—category was 1: “Caucasian.””

Nevertheless the set-up was potentially intriguing – combining time travel (of which many great science fiction stories have been written but which is a trap for the unwary) and dystopian fiction.

It is a potential that is largely wasted in the remaining 85% of the book – as Adrianne (now Mary Ellen) lives in a college and is amazed at things like typewriters, hairsets and smoking while pursuing a rather dreamy romance with one of the tutors, who she believes to be a link to the world she has left. There are some rather half-hearted attempts to link the future totalitarianism to the anti-communist views of the day, as well as some more involved attempts to link them to the research at the time into conditioning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning).

Overall a harmless book – which I can certainly imagine my daughter enjoying as a light read.

An interesting read. Sci-if and dystopian fiction is my genre of choice and I was thrilled to be able to review this one. It starts well, gritty, fast paced and it kept my attention going. It did however lose rhythm about halfway through for me and to be honest I got bored. Once finished however, I was pleased I had read it. The ending was a bit strange and not what I expected.  Maybe that was the point. I enjoyed it but felt it lacking in some places.

Does a society where outspoken dissenters are vaporised or exiled seem so far-fetched in today’s USA? Adriane is a young woman with a mind of her own who finds herself exiled in the 1950s and a world where women knew their place. Will she find her kindred spirit and fight, or give in to mediocrity? I very much enjoyed this disturbing novel that seems not a million miles away!

Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates is a dystopian novel that gives a scary look into the future where everything you say and do is closely monitored. A young girl is sent to another time for four years as a punishment for going against the rules. 
I found this book disturbing and thought provoking.
I would like to thank NetGalley and HarperCollins UK, 4th Estate, William Collins for my e-copy in exchange for an honest review.

The amazingly prolific Joyce Carol Oates has written her novel in response to President Trump. All totalitarian regimes are the same, and The Hazards of Time Travel is reminiscent of Orwell's 1984.
It is the future, and North America has become rigidly authoritarian and has a form of apartheid. Adriane is caught thinking for herself, and is exiled to another time. 
Despite her punishment, Adriane is unable to be other than who she is. After a hideous depiction of her imprisonment and sentencing, Adriane is marooned in 1959. She discovers she is not the only person exiled there. 
Oates, through the story, is telling us what the world could easily become if right wing populism continues its' march through the West.

Joyce Carol Oates is a veritable powerhouse of the Great American Novel, and this is another good - if not great - addition to her canon.

The dystopian vision of the future could be a hackneyed choice of setting, but it gets a fresh reworking here as we find ourselves following young Adriane into 'exile' in a US where dissenters are deleted from the lives of their loved ones, and clever children dumb down their schoolwork to avoid drawing unfavourable attention from government forces.

Visions of the future are most potent when we've already captured glimmers of them in the present, and Oates excels at giving us an accessible glimpse of that boot stamping on a human face from the POV of a once-curious and enthusiastic teenage girl.