Free flowing and short novel on themes of time travel, pandemics, and the nature of reality. I enjoyed the speculation about planetary colonization and time travel, as well as how the characters connected through an "anomaly" in space and time. However most of the important questions raised in the book remain unanswered and I found myself wanting more when I reached the last page. ( )

This is a VERY short, unusual piece of work. It is set in four different time frames, early 20th century British Columbia, roughly present-day New York City, 23rd century moon colony and 25th century Time Institute.

The different threads are pulled together through the presence of a time traveler from the 25th century named Gaspary. Gaspary is recruited to work at the Time Institute to investigate what is essentially a “glitch in the Matrix”. As you might imagine, time travel is very strictly regulated in order to prevent corruption of the time line, which any reader of time travel genre can appreciate. Unfortunately, or not, Gaspary is not as meticulous in this regard as his overseers would like.

As stated, this is a very short work, easily consumable in a single sitting (3-4 hours), which is probably wise, given the complexity of the subject matter. The payoff is pretty decent and makes the effort worthwhile, ( )

LOVED!!! ( )

Sea of tranquility.
This is a speculative fiction story of time travel across several centuries.
The main character Gaspery is the one who time travels and his job is to investigate characters in the past. His sister Zoey works at the Time Institute, a government body that controls time travel. She pulls some strings and gets him the job. The only rule is that he cannot alter the path a person in the past or future can take.
I was not a fan of this book. I found it confusing and hard to follow. ( )

This is a book I wanted to fall in love with but it never actually happened, even though there were some promising parts. It started really strongly only to kind of fizzle out as I progressed. If this hadn't been so overhyped I would have probably given up. I kept waiting for something to turn everything around and make reading worthwhile.

Sea of Tranquility deals with the themes of plague/pandemic a lot and this just felt forced to me, so much that it feels like another cash-in pandemic novel. No matter that this is a book about time travel, it is trying to be mostly about this moment in time. I can appreciate the intention, but it didn't offer enough substance for that to carry the whole story.

The structure of seemingly unrelated timelines/stories coming together reminded me too much of Cloud Atlas, even some themes and motifs were exactly the same. But, this is messy and underdeveloped. Also, in this time-traveling novel that talks about the future - the future is just way too similar to the past. It came across as lazy writing, to disregard the historical setting to that extent (the first timeline was the only one that delivered).

To put it simply, this was not good enough to be good literary fiction, and it didn't have any elements of a decent science fiction. I don't really see the point of it, except for it to be a pandemic novel with meta references to other novels of this author, a filler that reads like a first draft.

One thing I enjoyed was the feeling of serenity that permeates this novel. There is also a very good sense of place, bringing back my memories of Vancouver Island.

3.5 stars. ( )