Scan barcode
A review by salimah
11.22.63 by Stephen King
4.0
Though the prevention of the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963 is the ostensible catalyst for the protagonist's decision (after being compelled by a man who is little more than an acquaintance) to go through a time portal, it feels incidental to the story at the center of this book (that is too long by at least a third), which is ultimately a love story.
I am rating it as highly as I am because it is well-crafted at the sentence level, the narrative infrastructure/architecture level, and because the premise is compelling. Time travel is so compelling, in fact, that it allows me to forgive the obvious arguments that should have persuaded our hero to refuse the mission out of hand: too many contingencies and potential consequences would result from altering history.
A man in 2011 would know that and frankly, I didn't believe that Jake (our main character) was invested enough to make the commitment it would require of him. It required a significant suspension of disbelief for me to accept that he could be compelled by the proprietor of the local diner to do his bidding. He's not just going back to 1963 to foil an assassination, he's going back to 1958 and will have to wait for the opportunity to reverse history five years from then, which necessarily means he will have to build a life, interact with people, fall in love in the meantime, events which will all impact the course of history. And for as much as Jake tells the reader he is concerned about The Butterfly Effect and doing too much to alter the course of events, all of that life-building he's doing when not thinking about the mission that takes him to the past is in direct opposition to that claim. If you ask me, he's more than a little reckless more than a few times.
But. . . with these criticisms noted, I can say unequivocally that I was never bored. I did get a little tired of some of the details and minutiae at some points, but the solid character and world-building meant this was never a slog.
I am rating it as highly as I am because it is well-crafted at the sentence level, the narrative infrastructure/architecture level, and because the premise is compelling. Time travel is so compelling, in fact, that it allows me to forgive the obvious arguments that should have persuaded our hero to refuse the mission out of hand: too many contingencies and potential consequences would result from altering history.
A man in 2011 would know that and frankly, I didn't believe that Jake (our main character) was invested enough to make the commitment it would require of him. It required a significant suspension of disbelief for me to accept that he could be compelled by the proprietor of the local diner to do his bidding. He's not just going back to 1963 to foil an assassination, he's going back to 1958 and will have to wait for the opportunity to reverse history five years from then, which necessarily means he will have to build a life, interact with people, fall in love in the meantime, events which will all impact the course of history. And for as much as Jake tells the reader he is concerned about The Butterfly Effect and doing too much to alter the course of events, all of that life-building he's doing when not thinking about the mission that takes him to the past is in direct opposition to that claim. If you ask me, he's more than a little reckless more than a few times.
But. . . with these criticisms noted, I can say unequivocally that I was never bored. I did get a little tired of some of the details and minutiae at some points, but the solid character and world-building meant this was never a slog.