thisistheway 's review for:

11/22/63 by Stephen King

4.0

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This book is a ride. Did I love it in the end? Yes. Was it hard at times to get there? Also yes. This book was about 300 pages too long. Yes we want the story to develop and the scene to develop but it didn’t need that much tedium to get the point across. That being said I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the yellow card man and wished he got more screen time. I could have done with more of him and less stake outs and gambling. That’s just me. The concept of messing with time isn’t new, neither is entering a different world through a hidden entrance. But this one was done well. We get the consequence of time travel and a little look at the game of what if? What if you could stop this one thing from happening? Would you? Should you? This is a good book for people who enjoy time travel, historical fiction and slow burn romance.  I think King really likes to take his time with stories and mess around in the minutia. I’m not sure why- perhaps to go on about his hobbies. It’s clear he likes classic cars, books, and dancing from the stuff of his I’ve read so far. He used this book to go on tangents about them in the name of setting the scene. I will have to eventually see how they repackage this for the mini series. The dance lessons prompted me to look up videos on YouTube so I could really picture it. I was surprisingly emotional watching videos of people Lindy hopping to In the Mood. That song is an ear worm if there ever was one. Reminds me of Easter and my grandfather and a cassette tape that my cousin ruined- remember when you could just pull the tape out of cassettes and would wind them up again with a pencil and hope they still played? Emotions are a funny thing and I have emotions tied to that song. I was crying without even consciously knowing why but it definitely stems back to that moment with my family dancing in the kitchen to that song. So I am grateful to this book for bringing me back to that memory.