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carlenj's review against another edition
4.0
I just finished reading this book and I definitely enjoyed it. I actually started reading it by chance, I guess because my moms job was giving away a bunch of books and I told my Best friend while she was over at my house that she could help herself to any book and I saw the title and I told her "hey this one sounds interesting" and as I read her the synopsis I was like "choose another book, I actually want to read this."
The book starts at chapter 11, which I completely loved, the story was great, the characters were great, I loved trying to figure everything out and then seeing how everything fell to place. I would have definitely given this book 5 stars if it wasn't for the fact that there is a lot of repetition, like I get it, the author is trying to make sure we understand every detail and that we don't have to go flipping back to previous pages if we missed something but it was a little annoying but overall it was a good book, really enjoyed it and would definitely recommend to anyone who likes books with a twist to them.
justlily's review against another edition
1.0
Another absolutely outrageous disappointment. Please explain to me how you can have such a cool premise for a story and fail it so utterly. How is this book so mind numbingly boring? How is that possible? I'm so FRUSTRATED right now.
First of all, the writing is awful. Nick and Julia are just picture perfect. They're both beautiful and in shape and rich and smart and friendly and just la-dee-fucking-dah everyone god damn loves them because they're Jesus reincarnated and split in two. They have the perfect jobs, the perfect home, loads of money that they're saving up to raise their picture perfect kids. I was expecting it to go Gone Girl wherein we find out that's all a facade and some really fucked up stuff is happening behind the scenes........ NOPE. The author is just genuinely so shallow that he made them that way. The good guys are Perfect. The bad guys are ugly and vulgar and stupid. What amateurish writing.
Not only are the characters absolutely insufferable but somehow, like I said above, the author manages to take a backwards in time moving murder mystery with a giant plane crush, mobster like thugs, millions of dollars stolen, and more...and put me to fucking sleep. Chapters upon chapters of shit I did not care about at all, that added nothing to the story, just complete meaningless drivel for pages on end.
I'm angry I wasted so much time on this book. The ending didn't make it even close to worth sitting through the garbage pile that was the rest of it.
First of all, the writing is awful. Nick and Julia are just picture perfect. They're both beautiful and in shape and rich and smart and friendly and just la-dee-fucking-dah everyone god damn loves them because they're Jesus reincarnated and split in two. They have the perfect jobs, the perfect home, loads of money that they're saving up to raise their picture perfect kids. I was expecting it to go Gone Girl wherein we find out that's all a facade and some really fucked up stuff is happening behind the scenes........ NOPE. The author is just genuinely so shallow that he made them that way. The good guys are Perfect. The bad guys are ugly and vulgar and stupid. What amateurish writing.
Not only are the characters absolutely insufferable but somehow, like I said above, the author manages to take a backwards in time moving murder mystery with a giant plane crush, mobster like thugs, millions of dollars stolen, and more...and put me to fucking sleep. Chapters upon chapters of shit I did not care about at all, that added nothing to the story, just complete meaningless drivel for pages on end.
I'm angry I wasted so much time on this book. The ending didn't make it even close to worth sitting through the garbage pile that was the rest of it.
jinny89's review against another edition
4.0
Nick Quinn is absolutely devastated when he finds his wife Julia dead, shot in the face, in their home. Worse yet, he gets hauled away by the police because they found the murder weapon with his fingerprints on it! Nick loves Julia more than his own life, and would do anything if it only meant she can be alive. Enter a mysterious European stranger, who hands him an antique gold watch, telling him that it will give him the power to go back in time, allowing Nick to attempt to solve the mystery of who killed his wife and why, as well as attempting to prevent it.
Time travel isn’t ‘straight-forward’ in this novel (if time travel can ever be thought of as a straight forward matter). The watch only allows Nick to go back one hour in time, for one hour; then he will go two hours back in time, stay there for one hour; then three hours … etc. (For example, it is 6:00PM, he goes back in time to 5:00PM. When it reaches 6:00 again, he goes back to 4:00. When it reaches 5:00, he goes back to 3:00, and so on and so forth). There aren’t “multiple copies” of Nick in time; when he goes back in time, that becomes the present time (so he doesn’t have to worry about running into himself from the past or anything like that).
Anyway, I thought this was an interesting take on time travel, although at first I wondered how much of the mystery he can really solve if he only has an hour at a time. While at first Nick doesn’t get much accomplished because he’s no detective and has no clue where to start, as he travels back further and further in time, he uncovers some startling corruption. Once he got on the ball, he was on a roll, although his actions sometimes — or rather, often — have unintentional consequences and many a time, Nick becomes frustrated that he messed things up to become even worse than they were before (for example, he gets other people killed. Whoopsie, Nick?) Sometimes I got a little mad at Nick and wanted to yell at him through the pages, “Why would you do that?”, hahaha.
I truly enjoyed reading this novel. It is hard to put down because every time you flip the page, Nick discovers something new, or does something that makes you wonder how it can affect the future, so I just had to keep reading to find out what the effects are. I personally just love books that deal with time manipulation. It really has a way of keeping you in suspense. In many ways, I think of this book as a mystery as well. Nick starts off not knowing a thing about his wife’s murder, only that she was obviously targeted, and somehow, he unravels the truth which has its roots pretty far down and away from what this normal suburban couple could possibly be involved in. It is also a fast paced book, which I deeply appreciated because I really dislike slow-moving plots. Reading this novel was like a refreshing breeze.
Of course, nothing is perfect. I found the author’s writing to be a little “philosophical” at times. He runs off into small tangents about the morality of time manipulation, or love (but mostly about time manipulation). This occurred a little too frequently for my liking, but it is usually short. The characters are all flat, one dimensional characters, but that didn’t really bother me too much since this is more about the plot than it is about characters. Another thing (which I feel is always a very important part of any novel … for obvious reasons) is the ending. While I was not unsatisfied by it, it just seemed to lack a bit of oomph. We have this fast, intriguing, clever plot … then the end just seems a bit anticlimactic. I don’t think the ending sucks exactly, just that it could have been better.
But with all that said and done, I really did find this novel to be exciting and entertaining. I would definitely read other/future works by this author!
(This review is also posted at http://skyink.net).
Time travel isn’t ‘straight-forward’ in this novel (if time travel can ever be thought of as a straight forward matter). The watch only allows Nick to go back one hour in time, for one hour; then he will go two hours back in time, stay there for one hour; then three hours … etc. (For example, it is 6:00PM, he goes back in time to 5:00PM. When it reaches 6:00 again, he goes back to 4:00. When it reaches 5:00, he goes back to 3:00, and so on and so forth). There aren’t “multiple copies” of Nick in time; when he goes back in time, that becomes the present time (so he doesn’t have to worry about running into himself from the past or anything like that).
Anyway, I thought this was an interesting take on time travel, although at first I wondered how much of the mystery he can really solve if he only has an hour at a time. While at first Nick doesn’t get much accomplished because he’s no detective and has no clue where to start, as he travels back further and further in time, he uncovers some startling corruption. Once he got on the ball, he was on a roll, although his actions sometimes — or rather, often — have unintentional consequences and many a time, Nick becomes frustrated that he messed things up to become even worse than they were before (for example, he gets other people killed. Whoopsie, Nick?) Sometimes I got a little mad at Nick and wanted to yell at him through the pages, “Why would you do that?”, hahaha.
I truly enjoyed reading this novel. It is hard to put down because every time you flip the page, Nick discovers something new, or does something that makes you wonder how it can affect the future, so I just had to keep reading to find out what the effects are. I personally just love books that deal with time manipulation. It really has a way of keeping you in suspense. In many ways, I think of this book as a mystery as well. Nick starts off not knowing a thing about his wife’s murder, only that she was obviously targeted, and somehow, he unravels the truth which has its roots pretty far down and away from what this normal suburban couple could possibly be involved in. It is also a fast paced book, which I deeply appreciated because I really dislike slow-moving plots. Reading this novel was like a refreshing breeze.
Of course, nothing is perfect. I found the author’s writing to be a little “philosophical” at times. He runs off into small tangents about the morality of time manipulation, or love (but mostly about time manipulation). This occurred a little too frequently for my liking, but it is usually short. The characters are all flat, one dimensional characters, but that didn’t really bother me too much since this is more about the plot than it is about characters. Another thing (which I feel is always a very important part of any novel … for obvious reasons) is the ending. While I was not unsatisfied by it, it just seemed to lack a bit of oomph. We have this fast, intriguing, clever plot … then the end just seems a bit anticlimactic. I don’t think the ending sucks exactly, just that it could have been better.
But with all that said and done, I really did find this novel to be exciting and entertaining. I would definitely read other/future works by this author!
(This review is also posted at http://skyink.net).
lavoiture's review against another edition
4.0
I'd really rather give it 3.5 stars because the writing is lousy. The dialogue is incredibly stilted, and the whole thing is written like it's going to be a movie. That said, it was very interesting and a quick read. If you like Dan Brown-type books, you'll like this.
blairconrad's review against another edition
2.0
A very interesting premise, and pretty exciting pacing.
Other than that, there's really nothing here. The characters were completely undeveloped and the prose was - at best - flat and uninteresting, with absolutely no personality. The dialogue was a travesty - wooden at best, and often reminiscent of a very dry encyclopedia entry.
Couple that with a tonne of typos (including a company name going from Halix to Halifax a mere 217 pages apart), and way too many POVs, and I was left with a book that I finished for the sake of finishing, not out of any particular enjoyment.
Other than that, there's really nothing here. The characters were completely undeveloped and the prose was - at best - flat and uninteresting, with absolutely no personality. The dialogue was a travesty - wooden at best, and often reminiscent of a very dry encyclopedia entry.
Couple that with a tonne of typos (including a company name going from Halix to Halifax a mere 217 pages apart), and way too many POVs, and I was left with a book that I finished for the sake of finishing, not out of any particular enjoyment.
tensy's review against another edition
3.0
Starred review in Booklist, "one of the best thrillers of the year." This book had good pacing and I was pleasantly surprised by some of the plot twists, but it was easy to determine early on what was in "the box." The novel had so many repetitive passages that I fast-forwarded through several in the audiobook version without missing a thing. Would have given it a 4, but for those repetitive sections.
enrichingerin's review against another edition
5.0
This book was amazing! The thought that would have gone into everything in writing this is just mind blowing. I was totally hooked and couldn't wait to read more each day. It was suspenseful and I found myself rooting for the right event to happen. Definitely would recommend this to anyone whose a fan of a good thriller.
gbdill's review against another edition
4.0
This is the first book I have ever read by this author. And, overall it was well liked. What I really liked was it's uniqueness. A book that is literally read backwards. With the last chapter read first then going backwards until you end with chapter one. The story plays out in reverse as the protagonist is able to find a fascinating way to travel backwards in time to "fix" or "prevent" something from happening which the reader will discover in the first, I mean, last chapter at the beginning of the book. The book's only downfalls were that scenes tend to get a little scattered at times and can, at times, become a bit confusing. It also feels a bit repetitive as it rehashes the same events. Nevertheless, these same events always have a new twist to them. This is definitely a book that requires careful attention to, not just some easy poolside read otherwise you will get lost. Overall, this is a good read. And, I look forward to reading more by Doetsch.
gesch's review against another edition
2.0
Richard Doetsch’s “The 13th Hour” delivers exactly what you’d expect from reading the book’s sinopsis – fun, light, forgettable.