Reviews with content warning for Colonisation - Ministry of Time

Reviews tagging 'Colonisation'

Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

127 reviews

jairereads's review against another edition

4.0

emotional funny mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

The final third… I thought this book was waffling a bit (the uneven pacing is my biggest knock), but suddenly everything started collapsing into itself in an intricate frenzy. Picture this: the end credits are silent and no one in the theater stands up until they’re prepared to step into the new self they’ve just unlocked.

Content Warnings

mimsyb's review against another edition

2.0

funny mysterious sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

I adored the beginning of this book. I love the concept so much, I found the beginning engaging, and I really enjoyed the writing style. Consequently I will read Bradley's short stories, and an excellent sequel would make me increase this rating significantly. I love the cover. Unfortunately the book by itself was ultimately quite disappointing to me. The author described the book's take-away as

"we don't need time travel to change ourselves, look to the future, and make the future more beautiful."

I wish I agreed. Only the very last page addresses that, and I struggled to believe it given everything that had happened. What am I missing? The book left me feeling that

the future would stay bad or worsen, change is hard, and some people are doomed to failure.

Not true, but depressing.

Good: There is a lot of clever, humorous skewering of racist remarks and micro-aggressions the main character had experienced. The author uses a lot of fun vocabulary words and interesting descriptions. If the British slang, words drug from long gone historical eras, and arcane vocabulary get a little dense and sometimes ungoogle-able, or if a few descriptions didn't land--well, I want to see more of this style, so I can overlook that. I wish I hadn't googled vocab so much.

Detailed, frequently lustful descriptions of several people's bodies are rampant. That was especially frustrating given the general lack of character development. I kept wondering if the plot was building towards person x and y being in love, or x and z, or z and y, etc. ***Mood spoilers for the ending and very general allusions to plot in the rest of this review***

While one of those romances does suddenly happen

, we never seem to learn the things about these characters that the book teasingly hides from us-- things that would make the romances or friendships so much sweeter. In fact the MC acknowledges her lack of insight about the other characters numerous times; nothing changes.

Worse, I felt the events in the last 25% of the book really ruined any enjoyment of the romance because

the MC continues to treat her lover badly, never really reforms, and he understandably hates her and leaves her for it.

The very end of the book is

somewhat ambiguous and potentially hopeful

but I struggled to feel that a few vague paragraphs really offset the second half of the book. I felt unsatisfied and disappointed. The MC spent so much time discussing racism and the way that racialized people should or shouldn't act, but it was ultimately very hard to tell what her ultimate conclusions were or if she had changed as a result of her own self-flagellations. It reminded me of Katniss Everdeen's attitude at the end of the Hunger Games, which seemed problematic given that the MC, unlike Everdeen, recognizes she's made a lot of mistakes.

Of course it's a nuanced subject, the author doesn't necessarily owe us anything, the passages probably weren't written for white people to understand!, the MC was part of

a horrible system that bears a lot of blame

, and is a complex, flawed person. Perhaps I'm missing something. Ultimately it was confusing, very sad, and unsatisfying that the (at first) lovable MC is

morally gray and never really reforms

. That's how life is, but I just didn't want to read about that in fiction today, hence my rating.

Content Warnings

trollmila's review against another edition

4.75

adventurous emotional mysterious fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

I found there was a few times where I felt there was too much foreshadowing. I finished it with a heavy (positive) feeling in my torso. It was interesting and engaging and I love the expats so much. The main character never gets named and I love that choice.

Content Warnings

toriwatson's review against another edition

3.0

adventurous mysterious medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

I was really excited for this novel’s premise/concept, but it honestly didn’t execute it in a satisfying way for me personally. It had lots of interesting things it was trying to do, but in the end seemed muddled. I didn’t really click with the MC, but I loved the historical expat characters- they redeemed the book for me in many ways. The author seemed to try to justify the MC at the end but it came a little too late for me, especially after the government spy plot stuff. The sci-fi aspects were very hit and miss, interesting but also didn’t make a lot of sense- maybe I just didn’t get it/understand all of it. I honestly wished I liked this book more, I love time travel stories so I am kinda disappointed.

Content Warnings

booksandbujos's review against another edition

2.75

mysterious slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

This book was sci-fi according to Goodreads, but I agree more with storygraph and classifying this as a romance. The parts of this that is sci-fi is really only the time travel and that is soo not the focus of this book. It is the tool to bring Graham to the time the story takes place, but doesn’t really come in to most of the plot aside from that. In reality this book is about our nameless narrator falling in love with Graham, though I honestly never felt the chemistry between them. Our narrator says that she finds him attractive and he does a few nice things for her, but those alone do not a romance make. And then the ending felt too rushed. Like that was the interesting part. That is where the time travel and the mystery of this novel really come in, but we’ve already spent 80% of this book on a relationship with no chemistry so I’m only given like 50-75 pages of intrigue and time travel and spy antics and then the book ends and I am left with so many questions, but not in a good way.

Content Warnings

alisonvh's review against another edition

3.5

adventurous funny mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

This book was fine. I doubt it’s anything that will stick with me for long, but it was a fun read. At times the pacing seemed to drag a little, but I did enjoy watching the MC slowly realize the Ministry might not have the best intentions.

Content Warnings

meghanm404's review against another edition

3.0

adventurous challenging emotional funny informative mysterious reflective sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

Content Warnings

schubertan's review against another edition

3.5

adventurous emotional mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

Content Warnings

tamarant4's review against another edition

4.75

challenging emotional funny lighthearted mysterious 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

The time-travel project was the first time in history that any person had been brought out of their time and into their far future. In this sense, the predicament of the expats was unique. But the rhythms of loss and asylum, exodus and loneliness, roll like floods across human history. [p. 271]

The near future. The British government has a machine which allows a limited kind of time travel: the Department of Expatriation extracts doomed individuals from their own times -- just before their deaths, so that their removal won't impact history -- and studies them to learn about the side-effects, if any, of time travel. The unnamed British-Cambodian narrator of The Ministry of Time is recruited as a 'bridge', a person to act as companion, supervisor and teacher to one of the ex-pats. She's assigned to Eighteen Forty-Seven -- Commander Graham Gore, formerly of the doomed Franklin polar expedition.

Gore finds the 21st century challenging, but acclimatises fairly well. He and the bridge smoke a lot of cigarettes (and some recently-legalised cannabis), ride bikes, and explore Spotify ('Any music? Any performances, any time, whensoever you wish it?'). They interact with Sixteen Sixty-Five (Maggie, who is an Absolute Delight) and Nineteen Sixteen (Arthur, who starts off thinking he's a prisoner of war, and ... is not exactly wrong). There is bureaucracy; there are spies; there is romance, and comedy, and hand-wavy science, and hints of a grim future. There are short chapters of Gore's last days in the Arctic, in 1847. And there is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it a Wilfred Owen cameo.

The Ministry of Time explores colonialism, Empire, refugees and exiles, the nature of history, racism, and loyalty. That it does so with humour, pathos, and some truly hilarious scenes is a triumph. Our unnamed narrator is burdened with her refugee mother's experiences in Cambodia (she'd 'witnessed the sort of horrors that changed the way screams sounded'), with her own place in the mechanism of the British civil service, with her dual role as friend and as observer. She's constantly (and perhaps rightly) critical of her actions and choices, sometimes well before we're shown their consequences: this maintains tension throughout, and even the ending is less definite than one might wish.

I love this novel. It engaged me so much emotionally that the flaws (uneven pacing, some threads left dangling, that ending) don't matter. It is fun as well as inventive, and I'm looking forward to a future reread.

‘What happens if they survive?’ I asked.
‘Then you will have the lovely warm glow of having contributed to a humanitarian project.’
‘And if they die?’
‘Then you will have contributed to a scientific project.' [p. 38]

Content Warnings

goeagles91n's review against another edition

1.25

adventurous dark emotional mysterious sad fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

I cannot understand how this book is so popular. It tries to be every genre (romance, science fiction, historical fiction, mystery) without effectively being even one genre. It offers way too many details during the most disturbing parts of the book at the end and uses some of the most well-worn time travel tropes indiscriminately, throwing in plot twists that seem used only to try and distinguish this book from other time travel books (and make up for the whole “this book is about time travel and makes no sense, so we won’t bother trying to explain it to you” disclaimer in the first 10 pages, which is nothing if not lazy writing). The conclusion makes no sense and answers no questions, and the main protagonist somehow both is impacted severely by generational and current day traumas that define her character throughout the book and somehow “cured” via one internal monologue that lasts slightly over one page in the last five pages. The protagonist also bashes therapy multiple times, which I found hugely distasteful.

I should end with this books sole redeeming qualities, which were: (1) the author’s investigations into the multifaceted nature of identity, which were unfortunately too scarce throughout the book to make a read worthwhile; and (2) the commentary on immigration, which while shoehorned in felt important for the year 2025.

In short, don’t waste your time, and consider rewatching Dr. Who if you want to ponder time travel.

Content Warnings

More...