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3.83 AVERAGE
3.83 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
emotional
medium-paced
adventurous
emotional
tense
medium-paced
slow-paced
The dust jacket calls this book an epic adventure. It isn't. This book is a character study of three women throughout various points in their lives and there just happens to be some time travel thrown in to help move the plot along.
Of the three characters it seemed to me like Raisa, the granddaughter was the most fleshed out. I understood her and her motivations for the most part. The grandmother, Anna, was somewhat well written, but her motivations weren't satisfactorily explained, and her history wasn't explored in enough depth. And the woman in the middle, Molly, was one of the most annoying characters I've ever read. She never develops past a selfish teenage girl making stupid mistakes. Even once she's an adult, I still wanted to throttle her for the dumb things she said and did. And then blamed everyone else for her problems.
The thing that bugged me the most was the actual time travel. This book wasn't like Sea of Tranquility by Mandel. (A book I happened to be reading at the same time and after these two I don't want to read any more time travel for a very long time.) In that book, time travel is a fact that's never explained. It just exists and no further detail is given. That's fine. Atomic Anna is also unlike Andy Weir books. Weir explains the science behind his concepts in depth, but also in a way that the layperson can basically understand them. This book falls somewhere in the middle. Barenbaum throws scientific and mathematical terminology out like she's trying to win a prize for the most times graviton can be used in a book. We get liberal sprinkles of electromagnetism, waves, fission, Einstein, etc. but no actual explanation of what those mean. And frankly, I don't want to know. I wanted a story to entertain me, not bring me back in time to college level astrophysics. Nothing was explained well enough that I actually understood any of the theory behind time travel, but the science took up so many pages that I got bored and had to skim to keep from falling asleep.
Overall, an okay character study that needed some serious editing and different branding.
Of the three characters it seemed to me like Raisa, the granddaughter was the most fleshed out. I understood her and her motivations for the most part. The grandmother, Anna, was somewhat well written, but her motivations weren't satisfactorily explained, and her history wasn't explored in enough depth. And the woman in the middle, Molly, was one of the most annoying characters I've ever read. She never develops past a selfish teenage girl making stupid mistakes. Even once she's an adult, I still wanted to throttle her for the dumb things she said and did. And then blamed everyone else for her problems.
The thing that bugged me the most was the actual time travel. This book wasn't like Sea of Tranquility by Mandel. (A book I happened to be reading at the same time and after these two I don't want to read any more time travel for a very long time.) In that book, time travel is a fact that's never explained. It just exists and no further detail is given. That's fine. Atomic Anna is also unlike Andy Weir books. Weir explains the science behind his concepts in depth, but also in a way that the layperson can basically understand them. This book falls somewhere in the middle. Barenbaum throws scientific and mathematical terminology out like she's trying to win a prize for the most times graviton can be used in a book. We get liberal sprinkles of electromagnetism, waves, fission, Einstein, etc. but no actual explanation of what those mean. And frankly, I don't want to know. I wanted a story to entertain me, not bring me back in time to college level astrophysics. Nothing was explained well enough that I actually understood any of the theory behind time travel, but the science took up so many pages that I got bored and had to skim to keep from falling asleep.
Overall, an okay character study that needed some serious editing and different branding.
emotional
mysterious
medium-paced
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Content Warnings
Minor: Addiction
I really wanted to like this so much more than I actually do and that makes me sad because this just isn’t what I wanted it to be.
It’s very slow paced, and the characters don’t really provide the reader with anything to make you root for them. They’re rather boring if I’m to be honest, and it’s taking away from the time travel aspect which is what drew me to this novel in the first place.
And there just doesn’t seem to be enough of an emotional impact that the characters are imparting to me.
And let’s not forget that the Chernobyl setting and the sci-fi elements of time-travel are more background details than the focus. They serve as vehicles to prop up the characters and their connections with one another, but it’s not effective because the characters themselves just don’t have enough of a presence to keep the reader (in this case, me) engaged.
So I’m abandoning this.
Better luck next time I suppose.
adventurous
challenging
emotional
informative
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Atomic Anna is a Sci-Fi, Time Travel story featuring three generations of women whose intelligence, bravery and determination to protect one another with points of view shifting throughout.
Anna Berkova is a distinguished nuclear scientist considered a major architect of the Chernobyl power plant. Anna is awakened first by the explosion of the reactor in 1986, at the same moment her experimental time travel works and Anna jumps into her daughter Molly’s life. As she’s dying, Molly begs Anna to save her daughter, Raisa.
Molly is an addict trying to make the best of a bad marriage, care for her daughter and publish her graphic novel series called Atomic Anna featuring a super hero based on her scientist Mother. She has been raised since she was two by her mother’s best friends in the the old Soviet Union. In “Atomic Anna”, Molly lays the framework for development of a component to improve the time travel jumps of Anna’s continued experiments.
Raisa is the self taught math/physics genius who clings to the Atomic Anna series as her one connection to her troubled mother and grandmother.
The story shifts from one to the other of these three women until their individual destinies come crashing together. The book is part historical fiction, part Sci-Fi, part romance, part mystery and part family saga. The characters are troubled women—each a genius in their own way—brought together by one woman’s vision of a super hero. I highly recommend this book to fans of all these genres.
challenging
emotional
tense
slow-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Alcoholism, Drug abuse, Abandonment
Moderate: Death, Torture
Minor: Gun violence
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
sad
medium-paced