Member Review
Review by
Ian P, Reviewer
Some stand-out moments in this unique but flawed story of time travel that deals with themes of loss, obedience, conformity, consequences and missed opportunities.
3.5 stars rounded down. I don’t usually award half stars, but I’m so conflicted about how to rate this book that I don’t feel like I have any other option.
A brief summary from the blurb:
> **West is twenty years in the past.**
>
> **East is twenty years in the future.**
>
> **Would you travel through time to save the one you love?**
>
> Sixteen-year-old Odile Ozanne finds herself drawn into a devastating lifelong dilemma – to preserve the town’s carefully protected timeline, or to risk everything and try to rescue her one chance at happiness.
The time travel set-up interesting, and unique in my experience: the story is set in a valley bounded by mountains to the east and west. Beyond the mountains lie the same valley, but 20 years in the past to the west, and 20 years in the future to the east. This is an imaginative set-up for time travel. For me, though, it left significant questions unanswered that I found an ongoing distraction (more on that later).
**A feeling of disconnection**
First, let’s deal with the elephant in the room: there are no quotation marks. Direct speech is indicated by a paragraph break (although not always) along with the reader’s intuition that someone is now speaking due to the change in flow and tone. The story is told in the first person and there were quite a few times when I was genuinely confused about whether a sentence like “I didn’t know” was part of the first person narrative, or was being spoken by the narrator, or was being spoken by one of the other characters. I think I mostly got it right from context, but why is the author making me work so hard?
I have no problem with an author playing with convention and form for stylistic reasons or provide a particular feel - but I simply didn’t see the point of the lack of quotation marks. Worse than that, not only did it get in the way of the reading experience, but it also got in the way of my engagement with the story and the characters. For me, the lack of quotation marks added distance - as if all of the speech was either badly remembered, or was being reported third-hand. It had the disconnected feel of a badly dubbed foreign film.
This brings me to characterisation. I’m not sure whether the main character, Odile, was supposed to be somewhat neurodivergent - with sentences like “startled, I forgot to smile back” seeming to indicate the processing of emotions being a deliberate activity - or perhaps she was just supposed to be shy. Either way, she is written with an emotional detachment, and seems to be on the sidelines for many of her experiences and relationships with other people. Unfortunately for me, this also meant that I had no sense of the depth of her emotion for her best friend, Edme, whose fate is pivotal for much of the plot. I did wonder whether this was just my own disconnection with the author - that perhaps the author wasn’t going to be able to make me feel anything for any of the characters - but this wasn’t the case: I found one of the scenes where Odile escorts an old man into an adjacent valley very moving.
**The Time Travel Mechanism**
I had so many problems with the time travel mechanism, where valleys to the east and west are 20 years removed…
Firstly, the entire world in which the story unfolds is only a few kilometres wide, but the society is advanced enough to have buses and cars. This means that there needs to be a certain amount of heavy industry: mining, steel works, petrochemicals, manufacturing, etc. This is briefly alluded to at one point (“The pavement ended and the streetlights tapered off at the gloomy remains of the brickyard and some factories. There was no more need for them to operate, the Conseil said“), but a few factories isn’t enough. Worse than this, the valley is also bounded to the north and south - the valley is the entire world. It’s not like there is an “industrial zone” elsewhere that would explain this. Of course, none of this is important to the plot, but I found it very distracting.
Secondly, the “single timeline” rules of time travel in this book would result in an incredibly delicate hold on a stable reality. Changes in the past (the west) will impact the future (the east). In fact, this is poetically described at one point: “A person goes west, he interferes, and then new time rolls over him like a wave, leaving nothing behind. It’s as simple and ruthless as that.” This set of timeline rules is fine in principle, and is well established in speculative fiction in general. However, when this is combined with the “walk west and you end up 20 years in the past” mechanism in this book, then the entire world becomes very fragile. The purpose of the “Conseil” in the book is to police movement between valleys, due to the consequences to the timeline of uncontrolled attempts to interfere with the past. However, we’re supposed to believe that the valleys go east and west without end - that they are effectively infinite. This means that the Conseil has to have a perfect record in every one of the infinite valleys to the west in order to prevent waves of updated time continuously crashing eastwards through the valleys. This seems unlikely. And what about a bird (because there are birds) flying west and, for example, causing a car accident? This delicacy of the timeline is essential to the plot, and yet is inherently infeasible.
**The Good Stuff: Plot and Character**
One final negative word before the good stuff: the pace is incredibly slow, and the balance of story establishment vs payoff is too skewed towards story establishment for my liking. For me, the payoff of all of the world building and character development kicked in at 80-90% of the way through, which represents quite a lot of slogging through world building up to that point.
However, the payoff was very satisfying. For all that I’ve criticised the distracting elements of style and world building, I found the progression of the plot (who ends up where, and for what reasons) to be surprising and enjoyable - there were points where the plot took a sharp turn in a way that I wasn’t expecting, and I really appreciated that.
The blurb would have us believe that the book is about lost love and redemption - the chance to bring back something that’s been lost. And while it is about that, the “something that’s been lost” runs so much deeper than a relationship with a childhood friend. Compliance to authority for the greater good in the face of personal loss is a theme that runs throughout the story. Coming to terms with regret and lost opportunity is also a persistent thread - and a thread that is made poignant by the tantalising prospect of being able to travel back in time and interfere, in an attempt to change outcomes. And it’s in the main character’s self-absorbed, introspective contemplation on the direction that her life has taken in the face of all of this that the author’s characterisation really shines. Odile’s combination of regret, resignation, and conflict later in the story ultimately gave her the sense of depth and reality that I was hoping for - and that’s what will stay with me from this book.
3.5 stars rounded down. I don’t usually award half stars, but I’m so conflicted about how to rate this book that I don’t feel like I have any other option.
A brief summary from the blurb:
> **West is twenty years in the past.**
>
> **East is twenty years in the future.**
>
> **Would you travel through time to save the one you love?**
>
> Sixteen-year-old Odile Ozanne finds herself drawn into a devastating lifelong dilemma – to preserve the town’s carefully protected timeline, or to risk everything and try to rescue her one chance at happiness.
The time travel set-up interesting, and unique in my experience: the story is set in a valley bounded by mountains to the east and west. Beyond the mountains lie the same valley, but 20 years in the past to the west, and 20 years in the future to the east. This is an imaginative set-up for time travel. For me, though, it left significant questions unanswered that I found an ongoing distraction (more on that later).
**A feeling of disconnection**
First, let’s deal with the elephant in the room: there are no quotation marks. Direct speech is indicated by a paragraph break (although not always) along with the reader’s intuition that someone is now speaking due to the change in flow and tone. The story is told in the first person and there were quite a few times when I was genuinely confused about whether a sentence like “I didn’t know” was part of the first person narrative, or was being spoken by the narrator, or was being spoken by one of the other characters. I think I mostly got it right from context, but why is the author making me work so hard?
I have no problem with an author playing with convention and form for stylistic reasons or provide a particular feel - but I simply didn’t see the point of the lack of quotation marks. Worse than that, not only did it get in the way of the reading experience, but it also got in the way of my engagement with the story and the characters. For me, the lack of quotation marks added distance - as if all of the speech was either badly remembered, or was being reported third-hand. It had the disconnected feel of a badly dubbed foreign film.
This brings me to characterisation. I’m not sure whether the main character, Odile, was supposed to be somewhat neurodivergent - with sentences like “startled, I forgot to smile back” seeming to indicate the processing of emotions being a deliberate activity - or perhaps she was just supposed to be shy. Either way, she is written with an emotional detachment, and seems to be on the sidelines for many of her experiences and relationships with other people. Unfortunately for me, this also meant that I had no sense of the depth of her emotion for her best friend, Edme, whose fate is pivotal for much of the plot. I did wonder whether this was just my own disconnection with the author - that perhaps the author wasn’t going to be able to make me feel anything for any of the characters - but this wasn’t the case: I found one of the scenes where Odile escorts an old man into an adjacent valley very moving.
**The Time Travel Mechanism**
I had so many problems with the time travel mechanism, where valleys to the east and west are 20 years removed…
Firstly, the entire world in which the story unfolds is only a few kilometres wide, but the society is advanced enough to have buses and cars. This means that there needs to be a certain amount of heavy industry: mining, steel works, petrochemicals, manufacturing, etc. This is briefly alluded to at one point (“The pavement ended and the streetlights tapered off at the gloomy remains of the brickyard and some factories. There was no more need for them to operate, the Conseil said“), but a few factories isn’t enough. Worse than this, the valley is also bounded to the north and south - the valley is the entire world. It’s not like there is an “industrial zone” elsewhere that would explain this. Of course, none of this is important to the plot, but I found it very distracting.
Secondly, the “single timeline” rules of time travel in this book would result in an incredibly delicate hold on a stable reality. Changes in the past (the west) will impact the future (the east). In fact, this is poetically described at one point: “A person goes west, he interferes, and then new time rolls over him like a wave, leaving nothing behind. It’s as simple and ruthless as that.” This set of timeline rules is fine in principle, and is well established in speculative fiction in general. However, when this is combined with the “walk west and you end up 20 years in the past” mechanism in this book, then the entire world becomes very fragile. The purpose of the “Conseil” in the book is to police movement between valleys, due to the consequences to the timeline of uncontrolled attempts to interfere with the past. However, we’re supposed to believe that the valleys go east and west without end - that they are effectively infinite. This means that the Conseil has to have a perfect record in every one of the infinite valleys to the west in order to prevent waves of updated time continuously crashing eastwards through the valleys. This seems unlikely. And what about a bird (because there are birds) flying west and, for example, causing a car accident? This delicacy of the timeline is essential to the plot, and yet is inherently infeasible.
**The Good Stuff: Plot and Character**
One final negative word before the good stuff: the pace is incredibly slow, and the balance of story establishment vs payoff is too skewed towards story establishment for my liking. For me, the payoff of all of the world building and character development kicked in at 80-90% of the way through, which represents quite a lot of slogging through world building up to that point.
However, the payoff was very satisfying. For all that I’ve criticised the distracting elements of style and world building, I found the progression of the plot (who ends up where, and for what reasons) to be surprising and enjoyable - there were points where the plot took a sharp turn in a way that I wasn’t expecting, and I really appreciated that.
The blurb would have us believe that the book is about lost love and redemption - the chance to bring back something that’s been lost. And while it is about that, the “something that’s been lost” runs so much deeper than a relationship with a childhood friend. Compliance to authority for the greater good in the face of personal loss is a theme that runs throughout the story. Coming to terms with regret and lost opportunity is also a persistent thread - and a thread that is made poignant by the tantalising prospect of being able to travel back in time and interfere, in an attempt to change outcomes. And it’s in the main character’s self-absorbed, introspective contemplation on the direction that her life has taken in the face of all of this that the author’s characterisation really shines. Odile’s combination of regret, resignation, and conflict later in the story ultimately gave her the sense of depth and reality that I was hoping for - and that’s what will stay with me from this book.
*This page contains affiliate links, so we may earn a small commission when you make a purchase through links on our site at no additional cost to you.
