Please do not discount this book because of the title or the author like I initially did. I am not a current fan of works by Stephen King and read it because it was the selection of my BPW book group. I am so glad that I read it.
Yes, in my age group it is the date on which we all knew where we were: the day President John F Kennedy was assassinated. This is a great read which causes one to think about more than the time travel in the book. If you could go back in time, would you? Could you live with the consequences of what resulted from that change? It was not obvious to me that any change, however minor, would result in other changes.
The lead character is a teacher who has as a student the janitor of the school where he teaches. The writing assignment includes the story about how a family was brutally murdered by the father. More importantly, the writing brought the family members to life for the teacher in such a way that he seems to have or felt a connection (of sorts) to that family, particularly the janitor who was a young boy with real career dreams. The teacher wondered what the janitor would have become if that night had not happened.
The teacher has a friend who owns a diner that insists on his time travel trip through a “portal”. The friend is deathly ill and garners a promise from the teacher to stop the assassination. Of course, the teacher has other changes that he wants to make along the way but it results in some unexpected changes within himself and to his character in the process. The changes were not what I had expected but added to the overall flow of the book.
The twists and turns in this story held my attention and included real information about the names we came to know: Lee Harvey Oswald, his wife and family, Jack Ruby, JFK, and a host of others. It also includes stories within the story about the obvious of him having to live a lie about who he was really; he was a great teacher who could/did make a difference in the ‘50s and ‘60s, loving someone, losing that someone, etc.
Bottom line, changes came with consequences which were greater than I could have imagined and in my opinion, the story ended with ………………………….. NOPE, I AM NOT TELLING YOU.
Read it and share your thoughts with me.
On a scale of 1 to 10, I gave it a 10.
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