

She, her love interest, and the innumerable interchangeable secondary characters are all amazingly under-characterized and flatly written: I couldn't describe a single one of them to you, nor could I tell them apart much of the time.

I get annoyed with the overuse and misuse of that term, but it really applies here. The main character has no personality except to be perfect at everything and drive evil people to fits of revealing rage - classic Mary Sue stuff. I see more of a pattern here than to the plot and it's gross. The love interest up and screams at the protagonist, also out of nowhere, for.angst I guess? Oh and some rando background character suddenly calls the protagonist a slut and.sexually attacks her. Out of nowhere, one character is suddenly revealed to be a sexual predator, because Taylor needs the reader to hate him now. No characters at all, really: Taylor's creations seem to turn on a dime, depending on whatever the plot ("plot"?) dictates. Things happen, and they are sort of loosely slung-together, with very little sense of time passing (at one point the protagonist notes she's known another character for five years, and I genuinely thought only a single year had passed since their meeting at the beginning of the novel) and with absolutely no character development. The title unfortunately describes the way this book is plotted. For wherever Historians go, chaos is sure to follow in their wake.

And, as they soon discover - it's not just History they're fighting.įollow the catastrophe curve from 11th-century London to World War I, and from the Cretaceous Period to the destruction of the Great Library at Alexandria. But one wrong move and History will fight back - to the death. Their aim is to observe and document - to try and find the answers to many of History's unanswered questions.and not to die in the process. Meet the disaster-magnets of St Mary's Institute of Historical Research as they ricochet around History. Maintaining the appearance of harmless eccentrics is not always within their power - especially given their propensity for causing loud explosions when things get too quiet. They don't do 'time-travel' - they 'investigate major historical events in contemporary time'. "History is just one damned thing after another."īehind the seemingly innocuous façade of St Mary's, a different kind of historical research is taking place.
