The Beautiful Land

April 22, 2013
Averill’s slight time-traveling love story won the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award before being picked up by Ace. Averill centers his novel on Tak O’Leary, a Japanese-American explorer, former TV host, and would-be suicide, and his girlfriend, Sam, a war veteran suffering from terrible PTSD. The two are sympathetic and appealing characters in a one-dimensional way, caught up in a clumsy and meandering plot. Tak finds Sam; Tak loses Sam; Tak takes on an evil genius in a frantic effort to preserve reality and save Sam. Averill has some clever ideas—such as neatly sidestepping the paradoxes inherent in time-travel stories—but the narrative suffers from a paucity of characters and a lack of any real surprises. Still, Averill injects enough breeziness and lovers’ angst to keep the reader lightly engaged.

May 15, 2013
Time travel thriller, complete with suicidal hero, crazy girlfriend and mad, bad scientist: Averill's debut. Tak O'Leary made a name for himself as the daredevil host of a TV reality show where he would tackle extreme environments accompanied only by a knife and a cameraman. Eventually, he lost everything. He's ready to hang himself in a crummy New York hotel room when the phone rings: It's Judith Halford, executive of the Axon Corporation, offering him a job as an explorer. What she doesn't yet tell him is that he'll he exploring alternate realities, courtesy of a time machine invented by evil supergenius Charles Yates. Tak takes the job. Four years later, Tak understands that Yates is uninterested in exploration; instead, he wants to destroy all the timelines, leaving only one called the Beautiful Land, where the occupant--Yates himself--can create his own reality by the power of thought. Yates has already destroyed most of the alternate timelines by bringing in weird and apparently unstoppable birdlike entities whose only purpose is to kill. Tak wants to save the world, but he also wants to save the love of his life, Samira Moheb, an Iranian-American driven mad by the horrors she witnessed as a translator during the Iraq War. So, he steals a portable version of the time machine and sets off to find Samira, who thinks he hanged himself four years ago. Much of this, and what ensues, is exciting and often touching, although the semicomic tone sits uneasily among the horrors. There's a huge structural problem, too; Averill constructed his backdrop to fit the plot, with the result that the time travel ideas lack logic and rigor. Yates is an absurdly stereotypical figure. Where do the mysterious bird-things come from, and what makes them impossible to defeat? And what does a wish-fulfillment reality have to do with time travel? Overall, half enjoyable, half unpalatable.

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Starred review from June 15, 2013

Saved from suicide by a job offer he could not refuse, computer prodigy Takahiro O'Leary agrees to work for the enigmatic Axon Corporation, exploring parallel time lines. He hopes his success will enable him to prevent the death of Samira Moheb, a high school flame now tortured by PTSD from repeated tours of duty in Iraq and destined to die on her next tour. When Tak unearths the real reason for the company's existence--to discover one particular time line called The Beautiful Land and use it to overwrite the history of the world--he realizes that he must stop Axon from carrying out its plan, even if doing so destroys him and Samira. VERDICT The winner of the 2012 Amazon Best Novel Contest, Averill's debut work demonstrates its author's extraordinary ability to create believable (and believably conflicted) characters while spinning a complex high-tech plot in terms most readers can understand. Combining sf and horror with a skill worthy of a veteran author, Averill has written a beautiful tale that should appeal to most fans of high-tech sf and technohorror.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2013
Tak has nothing to lose when he gets a call from the Axon Corporation with an intriguing job offer: exploring alternate time lines. Once he's spent a few years jetting between different realities, however, he discovers that Axon is up to more than just exploration, and he steals a mobile time machine and goes rogue. The cartoonishly evil mad scientist at Axon's helm, Charles Yates, who would smother a baby with a pillow in the name of science, has nefariously plotted to destroy every reality in existence with the help of a virus: a flock of grotesque, birdlike creatures that indefatigably obliterate everything. With the help of his friend Samira, a PTSD-stricken, former Iraq War translator, Tak flashes in and out of realities to escape the virus and hopefully save all the universes. Tak's sardonic and irreverent tone moves this interdimensional caper along at a quick and entertaining pace, which helpfully distracts from its thin characterization. Averill's debut may lack depth, but it makes up for it with a quippy lead and well-wrought action.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)