Michelle McBeth

I like the beginning of this book. The reader is teleported (quite literally) to a medieval estate in England and sees the world from the eyes of a female maid. There is something uncanny about this woman, like she knows far too much than what it seems at first.

Since I did not read the story synopsis before diving right in, my mind swirled into endless possibilities of what kind of Sci-Fi story this is. I also wondered nonstop what does a medieval family estate have anything to do with a black metallic sphere in some kind of wormhole cover. Hrmm...

Fear not, for hints come our way as we realize the owner of the estate is William Shakespeare! Oooh! I do not wish to spoil too much about the beginning of the story, only that this seems to be a secret time travel society that sends trained agents (nicknamed Librarians) to different eras and learn lost secrets that have befuddled historians. For what purpose, the book doesn't yet reveal everything within the first third of the novel.

I quite liked our protagonist Adelaide. At first sight, she wondered why the ultrasecret government agency called "The Laboratory" wanted to hire her. Her skills are: bookworm, workaholic, obedient, and knows how to play the bagpipe. I like it when books offer us female protagonists that have several of the requirements for a strong woman without recurring to the muscle warrior trope. Quieter characters that enjoy their jobs and feel they are doing a service to humanity such as Adelaide are quite a nice fresh breeze of air.

The innane level of secrecy and hypervigilance of the facility only fuels my innate curiosity regarding the true purpose of sending agents to talk to famous writers and ask them intimate questions about their life. Are the higher ups really what they claim to be? Is Adelaide's immediate superior named Jim a good guy? Even though both stories are quite different, I sometimes felt some vibes regarding the socially acceptable vigilance from cameras inflicted on the pilots in the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Most of the first portion of the story doesn't let us know much about the world, but it is written in such an enjoyable way that I loved every minute of Adelaide's island vacation. By the time the book reaches its 30% point, the story conflict has been set into motion and you are already invested in wanting to know more.

Things get more complicated as the story advances where Addy has to travel to the past and fix the timeline before the laboratory murders one of her friends. This change of a sense of urgency felt quite realistic, and I enjoyed where the story was heading.

As for the ending, I don't hate it, but the quality of editing took a huge nosedive. I got the vibe the complexity of having 4 different potential timelines with varying consequences was more than could be easily chewed. Some scenes of the final 4 chapters felt messy, and the solution very convoulted. The little cliffhanger that irremediably entices the reader to read book 2 felt quite predictable (it isn't bad, but the rest of the epilogue felt like it was assembled together like a last minute homework essay without the utter care that characterized the first few chapters of the book).

While I did spot grammatical errors and oddly constructed sentences which can confer different meanings all over the book, they also became much more prominent in the final third of the story. I found the whole girl hooked to a helmet to be very confusing and was not smoothed in the edges at all.

Had it not been for the relative lackluster final third of the book, I would have given it 4.5 stars. It is still a good read overall, though.… (més)