In War Times

Starred review from March 5, 2007
This engaging alternate-universe tale posits a quintessential enigma of civilization: can technology be prevented from doing as much evil as good? Goonan (Light Music
) traces the career of amateur saxophonist Sam Dance, a young soldier who receives plans for a strange electronic device from his physics instructor, Magyar Gypsy Dr. Eliani Hadntz, after she seduces him on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor. She intends her "time machine"—melding physics and biology—to harness the human mind and rescue Europe from Nazi evil. As Sam experiences successive horrors of WWII, the love of jazz he and his friend Wink share enables them to build increasingly perfected models of Hadntz's device. Sam eventually plants the machines across the globe, hoping the technology will somehow cause various time-shifting realities and save humanity from its herdlike propensity for violence. Paralleling the evolution of modern jazz with the creative ferment of science, Goonan delivers a bravura performance.

May 1, 2007
Adult/High School-This alternate history with multiple threads blends bebop, physics, molecular biology, politics, and ethics into a compelling story of one family's journey through the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. Sam Dance is a soldier who, in early December 1941, has been sent by the army to study physics and other esoteric subjects in Washington, DC. One of his teachers, an Eastern European woman, seduces him and gives him a deviceand the plans for itthat she says will change the course of world history. The next day, Pearl Harbor is attacked, and Sam spends the rest of the war trying to figure out what the object exactly does, and what his role is. This novel is full of thought-provoking ideas about people and conflict. Can people be changed at the molecular level to cause them to prevent war? Can societies thrive and prosper without war? What are the connections between music, especially jazz, and physics? Readers with some knowledge of World War II and of the postwar period will probably get the most out of this book, and they will enjoy seeing where events in the novel diverge from what really happened. But any reader who likes alternate histories; strong, appealing characters; and provocative ideas will find plenty to admire in Goonan's book."Sarah Flowers, Santa Clara County Library, CA"

Copyright 2007 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2007
In 1941, Sam Dance, like many other young American men, joins the army, where he is trained in the tools of military intelligence. Even as his older brother, Keenan, falls during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Sam receives from one of his professors the plans for a device that could transform human nature and permanently end the desire for war. Though he spends most of his spare time trying to build the device, he eventually discovers that its effects are already being felt throughout the world. The author of the celebrated Nanotech Quartet (Queen City Jazz, The Bones of Time, Crescent City Rhapsody, andLight Music ) takes a turn at alternate history in a story as timely as today's news and as timeless as the world's hope for an alternative to war. Incorporating parts of her father's actual wartime diaries, Goonan has created a novel belonging in most libraries.

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 2007
This superlative alternate-history novel begins when educated army private Sam Dance is literally seduced into taking possession of something called the Hadnitz Device. According to its inventory, said device can change the course of history. Sam and his buddy in both electronics and playing jazz take this task seriously, and the reader will suspect they are having an effect when the Allies have to fight their way into Paris, and then when the Hiroshima A-bomb is unsuccessful. The latter turns out to mark a point of divergence, in which Sam ends up in something like our time line, and his buddy ends up in the one without the bomb. It falls to Sam and his family to prevent one of the catastrophic turning events of our time, through harrowing adventures and at a formidable price. Goonan's parents may deserve some credit for the outstanding authenticity of the historiography--she thanks them first--but her own thorough research has to take the lion's share. She can take all the credit for a narrative that has hardly a single flaw of pacing, setting, or characterization, and will be intelligible, not to say fascinating, to readers far beyond the ranks of World War II buffs. An authentic classic.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)