[LISTENED TO: July 2022] Just One Damned Thing After Another
This is the first book in a something-teen long series.
I sometimes wonder if I enjoy a series more for the narrator of the audio books than the quality of the books themselves.
I didn’t think that at the time of reading this, because i was swept up in the comedy and adventure and (yes, I’m saying it, time travel). However, while looking for a cover image, I read a scathing review of this book and felt that I did agree with many of the criticisms. I guess I just didn’t care. And I wonder if that’s because Zara Ramm gave great voice to the lead character Max and also did an amazing job with all of the different characters (male and female from all over the place).
As we meet Madeline Maxwell (Max), she is in a bad way. She has few prospects and fewer coins in her pocket. She’s pretty desperate until she gets a surprise visit from a former teacher who tells her about a job with poor pay and worse conditions.
This leads to a job as a historian at St. Mary’s Institute of Historical Research. The cool thing about St. Mary’s is that historians travel to the past to “confirm” details of things that happened. Essentially University researchers get to experience historical events first hand, including all of the dangers involved. The Institute is a part of University of Thirsk.
The negative reviewer wondered why the place is so understaffed (I mean, it’s a time travel university!) but the mortality rate is rather high. Many of the events and locations they travel to are around disasters. The historians need to be in period costume and behavior. Plus, they have a number of enemies. You also can’t change history in any meaningful way–the timeline will not budge–you must just observe, which is harder than it seems. Because if you try to interfere, the gods of History will have something to say about it:
How difficult is it to cause a ten-ton block of stone to fall on a potentially threatening historian observing the construction of Stonehenge?
The time travel is wide and varied. They go on missions so there’s no continuity in the story per se. First they go back to 1040 to see Westminster Abbey being built. The next jaunt is to the Somme in France in 1917, in the middle of WWI to discover the reason why a field hospital burned down. Max is nearly killed in the fire.
Up next is a Big Deal of a job: travel sixty-seven million years back in time to the Cretaceous Period. It is during the prep time that the romantic subplot is revealed between Max and Chief Leon Farrell.
Farrell reveals a secret that very few know: he is from the future and is in this timeline to ensure the integrity of St. Mary’s.
It’s on the trip to the dinosaurs that things get ugly. 73 days of delightful Cretaceous weather and then her partner on the team goes a little mad. There is a terrible fight and Max is almost left in dinosaur times.
We also learn of the existence of Clive Ronan, another time traveler who is out to destroy St. Mary’s. He has also been profiting off of the time travel pods by bringing tourists to the cretaceous period. The whole team travels back to stop him. Without getting into too many (more) details, important figures are hurt and a womn named (Bitchface) Barclay is put in charge of St. Mary’s. She immediately fires Max (there is a grudge that Max doesn’t fully understand).
Things work out (of course) in interesting ways and Max comes up with a clever idea of bringing a few items back from the library of Alexandria before they burn and having them “discovered” at St. Mary’s so they can get a lot of money.
Max is self-deprecating and cocky at the same time. She is mouthy and the story is chock full of snark. All of which suits Ramm to a T.
There’s surprising violence and a surprising sex scene. And then there’s the general manhandling of history which is funny and makes you winder how much research she actually did (does she know more than she is letting on?)
I enjoyed the heck out of this book even with its shortcomings. Sometimes a book doesn’t have to be brilliant to be fun as hell.
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