A review by kristineisreading
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

adventurous funny hopeful mysterious reflective tense medium-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? Yes

4.5

Wow! This is a legitimately good book. The characters are cleverly written, the dialog is top notch, and the writing itself is superb. The dialog and writing is what really sets this apart from other time travel books for me, but I'm struggling to articulate what makes it special. It's very human. It highlights how complex people are, how messy relationships can be. It's also laugh out loud funny at times. 

Let’s talk characters for a minute. Bradley does a great job at writing realistic characters. Our protagonist, whose name I don’t actually know (are we ever told what it is? Did I miss it?), is complicated. She is unprofessional to an extreme degree when it comes to keeping an emotional distance from Graham. She’s not great at building relationships with her fellow bridges and it’s unclear if this is a pattern in her working life or just a result of the strangeness of her bridge work. However, she does come to befriend Margaret and Arthur and clearly cares for them a great deal. Speaking of Margaret and Arthur – they’re wonderful, and love to see the LGBTQ representation here. The cast of characters is pretty diverse in general, which is impressive considering that half of them are white Brits from other centuries. And then there’s Graham. A character based on a real man, whose real story ends in tragedy. Here, he is fully imagined as a complex and extremely likeable person, who’s been plucked from literal certain death and transported through time, to his new reality where everyone he knows is dead, the world has changed drastically, and he himself is a walking, breathing anachronism. And yet! He navigates this with charm and grace. He is open-minded and willing to adapt his way of thinking to catch up with modern beliefs, although he does struggle with this at times. There’s a great scene where he is tasked with describing pictures he’s shown in order to catch any outdated language or beliefs so they can be corrected as he assimilates. He spends most of the time being whimsical, describing the pictures from the POV of different characters (a horse in an Apple store). However, for a picture of a woman in fatigues, hiding in the jungle, he simply says “a woman in the workplace.” He later goes on to say that it seems like attitudes about women haven’t changed that much, as they’re still expected to do everything they’ve always done (meaning cook, clean, care for their men and children), except now they’re also expected to contribute in the workforce. We stan a woke man, especially one who’s been thrown into the middle of feminism from a totally different century. 

I'm a big fan of the slow burn romance and it's done exceedingly well here. There’s no wishy-washy, will-they-won’t-they – it seems inevitable that they will, eventually. And when they do! It feels fully true to their characters, a little messy, and a lot realistic. However, the aftermath of that is where this starts to fall apart for me a little bit. The last 20% of the book lost me a little as it shifted into more of a spy story and the new romance got entangled in the mystery and intrigue, although I do appreciate that it showed another side of Graham and further developed his character. Ultimately I think I would have preferred if this had stuck to being a book about displaced time travelers adjusting to their new life, rather than turning into a quasi sci-fi spy thriller mystery complete with moles, sabotage, and a laws of physics defying twist. 

The ending is wholly unsatisfying. No spoilers, but I wanted a different resolution. I understand why it played out the way it did, but I don’t like it and this is the main reason I knocked off half a star.