B. Radom

Booker Wells takes a new job with SameBrain Corporation, whose slogan used to be "SameBrain, Toys of the Future." As his department, Creative, shares office space with Accounting, he soon meets a tall man in a long, black coat, who turns out to be Simmons, from Accounting.

On his first day, Booker finds out that Simmons can time travel via a device that he carries with him. Apparently, there are others who can also time travel, as Booker soon meets a jester in the men's room trying to flush his jester clothing down the toilet.

Soon, Booker is involved in an adventure with Simmons to save the micro-cam prophets from being murdered and Denver from being blown up.

I have mixed feelings about this book. For the first chapter or so, I was intrigued by the plot. Time travel books are enjoyable to me as I like to see the creativity with which each author explains how time travel is possible and deals with alternate universes. This concept was unique to me, and I wanted to read more.

Then, I got to the middle of the book. This part seemed repetitive as Booker and Simmons visit the different worlds of the various micro-cam prophets. I feel that this part was too bare-bones, perhaps too formulaic. Each world differed only in its visual appearance and how Booker and Simmons finally managed to save the prophet. There was not much detail to the different worlds - it would have been more interesting to me to know how the micro-cam prophet came to be there, how Simmons had come to the world the first time, how the world evolved as it did, etc. Unfortunately, it just seemed to be the same thing over and over.

Also, I wasn't really sure that I understood where the author was going with the "odds calculation" or how Simmons and Booker were able to enter alternate parallel realities without really changing anything.

But then, the end came and I was again intrigued. Of course, with many time travel books there is a surprise ending, which in this case I think was inventive, even though I didn't necessarily understand some of the reasoning behind what happened. It could also have used a little more detail, but it was definitely something that I did not see coming.

Overall, I probably enjoyed the book more than not. The writing was fairly well done -- not as professionally polished as some best-selling novels, but better than some publishing house books that I have read. It was a light, easy read with a fun concept. I think with some tweaking with the middle and end, but keeping the general overall story line, I would have enjoyed it more.

I received this book as a LibraryThing Giveaway in exchange for a fair review.… (plus d'informations)