Time and Time Again

December 1, 2015

Hugh Stanton, visiting his old Cambridge professor at Christmastime in 2024, gets pulled into one of their old "what if?" games. Professor McCluskey liked to challenge students to think of the one thing in history they would change. It turns out not to be an idle question this time, and Hugh learns that the professor was the inheritor of a box of papers left by Isaac Newton to be opened that very Christmas. The 17th-century scientist had predicted a loop in time, when 2024 would overlap with 1914, allowing a traveler to go back in time. Hugh is tasked with going back to that fateful year to stop one of the turning points in world history: the start of World War I. VERDICT Elton's (Two Brothers; High Society) thoroughly entertaining entry in the time-travel genre gives readers a dashing leading man trotting the globe on his secret mission to a historical moment fraught with danger, in which every choice can have unintended consequences.--MM

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2015
What if you had the opportunity to change one thing in history? Would you do it? What would you change? These are the central questions at the heart of Elton's hybrid historical fictiontime travel adventure. Due to a mathematical calculation done by Sir Isaac Newton and passed down in secret for close to 300 yearsnot to be opened until Christmas Eve 2024it's possible to travel back to the early summer of 1914. Hugh Stanton, ex-military and overall adventurer, is recruited by the Chronations, a group of Trinity scholars who have confirmed Newton's figures, to be the hero who will stop WWI from ever happening, thus saving millions of lives and, more important, stopping the twentieth century from entering into a spiral of bloodshed. The setup is compelling, the historical aspects are well researched, and the time-travel story line, though not well explained, wraps around itself in a tantalizing manner sure to please even the most hardcore time-travel purists. However, it is the complex, nuanced, and likable Stanton who will grab readers as they blindly follow and actively root for him with each turn of the page. He will do anything to set history right, even when he is what makes it wrong. Thought provoking and captivating, this is a novel for fans who love Stephen King's 11/22/63 (2011), Kate Atkinson's Life after Life (2013), and any of the award-winning time-travel hybrids by Connie Willis. A must-read with an awesomely unsettling ending that has very real implications for a modern audience.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)