A review by ezzydesu
Time Shards by David Fitzgerald, Dana Fredsti

 

It's called 'The Event,' an unimaginable cataclysm that shatters 600 million years of the Earth's timeline.

This book was a strange experience and I haven't read any book feeling the same. So what's going on? Time Shards has one of the best plot ideas for a SFF book I have ever come across, and it was awesome reading about it, but it just doesn't work with a all-words-no-pictures format. I am going to explain why later. First I want to add some content warnings to this book. Time Shards contains: Violent/graphic deaths, suicide, abduction, torture, & (violent) attempted rape.

This book is about how all of time shatters into millions of pieces and reorganises into a new version of Earth where dinosaurs can roam from their 'time shard' into the one with a piece of New York. This time shattering is called 'The Event'. Imagine you have 100 jigsaw puzzles and you just make a new one with pieces of all the puzzles. It would become one giant mess. That's basically how the Earth looks like after 'The Event'. Pretty cool, right?
In the story itself you follow Amber, a young adult cosplayer that is enjoying a date right after Comic Con when 'The Event' happens. The world is in pieces, just like her date, and she has to figure out where (when?) she is and what's going on on her own.

Now, I'll explain to you why I think this story doesn't work in a regular novel format. In short, the whole book relies on visuals and without it, some things won't make sense or the essence of the story gets lost. But when you are telling about what happens with the landscape and the people when 'The Event' is happening in real time, in a book that takes up so many pages to just visualize a few different times and places where the timeline is torn apart. It creates a 'Ten pages to describe a tree'-syndrome in a book and really messes with the pacing. This kept happening throughout the book when the main characters walked from shard to shard or encountered strange things. In a movie, all these pages could be summarized in a few shots or short scenes. This is because one visual can replace half a page of words.
Long story short, the book concept is amazing, it was written very well, but just the way how books work doesn't agree with this story and that's a shame. I think many people would put this book down as the book as it's slow points,

The cast of this books is really enjoyable. It's a thrown together bunch of different ages and personalities and that's always fun. My only pet peeve was that all of the cast originated in the last 100 years and then one from hundreds, if not thousands of years ago. There are freaking dinosaurs roaming around, give me Greek prophets or a sassy Golden Age theather player.

The type of story telling reminded me a bit of The Walking Dead, as both are stories without a super direct plot (''Oh we have to do this to save the world!'') in which the world as we know it has gone to shit and the only thing the survivers can do is adapt and survive. The plot got a bit more directer the last third or fourth of the book as you eventually learn more about what is going on. It's a light type of story and I really enjoyed it.
Besides the story telling, I also quite enjoyed the writing style, so I am definitely interested in reading more books by either author. When scrolling through both Goodreads, I saw quite some interesting books among them, so I am definitely keeping Dana Fredsti and David Fitzgerald on my radar.

I wouldn't per se recommend this book as it has its flaws, but you should definitely check out this book if you are a sci-fi fan. Time Shards is one very original and interesting SFF book that definitely deserves some love for the creativity. I really hope someone in Hollywood finds this book and options it for a movie, as that would be absolutely amazing!