Description
On a bustling road in Sydney, between a gelato bar and a chemist, lies an unassuming shopfront known simply as the Time Travel Agency.
Anna – possibly lightly concussed after a chance encounter with a car, possibly thinking clearly for the first time in a long time – quits her miserable job and agrees to work at the unusual business.
Teddy just can't seem to get up since his wife left him for his brother. When he spies an advert promising journeys into your past, he figures he can at least learn what went wrong.
And Jade can't stand the place. Behind the cosy waiting room and the smell of freshly brewed coffee, all the agency has to offer is false hope.
Over the course of one winter, three lives converge around this unusual agency claiming to offer a chance to revisit past choices. But is it a hoax? And if it's real, what is the catch?
Review
I love time-travel books, so I was really looking forward to reading this one. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite live up to my expectations. I found the book rather too long, with a lot of time devoted to one character’s life events, which at times felt like it distracted from what I thought was the most interesting part of the story—the time travel itself.
The idea of a Time Travel Agency was a good one. It’s not a completely new concept, but I liked the way it was developed here. I particularly enjoyed the scenes set inside the Agency and the actual time-travel sequences, although I would have liked there to be much more of them. For me, this was the most intriguing aspect of the book, and I felt the story could have made more of it.
Katya, the owner of the Agency, was by far my favourite character. She was very well written and I found myself much more interested in her and the Agency than in some of the other storylines.
There was also an interesting counselling element to the Agency. The people who travelled back in time didn’t simply revisit events; they were also encouraged to examine their experiences and how their memories of them had been affected. I found the exploration of false memory particularly interesting, and this added a more thoughtful dimension to the story.
The pace picked up considerably towards the end, when the different strands of the story began to come together. There was more action and, thankfully, more time travel, which I enjoyed. However, I had guessed the main twist quite early on, so the eventual reveal didn’t come as much of a surprise.
Overall, there were some really interesting ideas here, and I enjoyed the concept of the Time Travel Agency and the character of Katya. I just wish the book had focused more on those elements and had been a little shorter and faster-paced. As someone who loves time travel, I wanted more of the time travel itself, and that was ultimately what I felt was missing.
I'm giving this book 3 out of 5 stars. My thanks to Netgalley for the ARC to review.
