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A review by ergative
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
3.0
This book was trying to do three things, of which it did only one well. (1) A meditation on immigration and assimiliation in an alien world; (2) a time-travelling spy thriller; (3) a romance.
The first was . . . fine. Competent, but not terribly deep. I was struck by the moment when our narrator reveals 20th century atrocities by mentionoing the Holocaust (or, in another timeline, 9/11) -- when her whole Thing is that her mother escaped the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. It seems like kind of a missed opportunity to tie her own backstory with the events of the book.
The time-travelling thriller was not terribly satisfying, and I ended up getting confused about who the baddies actually are. Like, if Quentin was the (first) mole, then why did he give all of those key documents to our narrator?
And the sex was just not at all sexy. Like, extremely unsexy, actually. I'm not going to say what needed to change about it, because I have no expertise in this area. Even in my fanfiction years I never tried to write smut. But gosh, it left me cold.
The first was . . . fine. Competent, but not terribly deep. I was struck by the moment when our narrator reveals 20th century atrocities by mentionoing the Holocaust (or, in another timeline, 9/11) -- when her whole Thing is that her mother escaped the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. It seems like kind of a missed opportunity to tie her own backstory with the events of the book.
The time-travelling thriller was not terribly satisfying, and I ended up getting confused about who the baddies actually are. Like, if Quentin was the (first) mole, then why did he give all of those key documents to our narrator?
And the sex was just not at all sexy. Like, extremely unsexy, actually. I'm not going to say what needed to change about it, because I have no expertise in this area. Even in my fanfiction years I never tried to write smut. But gosh, it left me cold.