Book log 29/2016: Jodi Taylor: Just one Damn Thing After Another - Chronicles of St Mary’s #1

[jacey]

Maddie 'Max' Maxwell PhD is inaugurated into St Mary's Institute of Historical research which uses time travel to grub out the facts of history. Dark, exciting and hilarious in turn, this is a real page turner and yet delivers some real laugh-out-loud moments. Max is the product of a bad upbringing, saved only by the right teacher at the right time. Now that same teacher (retired) points her at St Mary's.

The institution is chaotic and dangerous. Eccentric hardly begins to cover it. Some of the staff are just plain bonkers, but in a useful way. Historians lose their lives or end up injured in a variety of ingenious ways, but somehow they keep functioning. Max survives her initial training, gets promoted to 'historian' and is attracted to tech Chief Farrell. Great! She's in business!

But someone is messing with the timelines, using history for pleasure and profit. On a trip to the Cretaceous to study dinosaurs everything comes to a head and Max must cope!

This book's a lot of fun and highly recommended. I immediately went out and got the second in the series.

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I've read a few of those and thought they were great. In fact I need to check whether there are any more I haven't read.

I thought the time travel was much more believable than Connie Willis's time travel. Willis's time travellers always seem incredibly timid and end up terrified most of the time just by the fact that they're in the past.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the Connie Willis books, but feel as though I should give them a try.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I find them a bit mixed, to be honest. The first one I read was To Say Nothing of the Dog which was a very funny time travel comedy to the Victorian period and I may read that again this summer because it's a great holiday read. I liked the WWII books enough to read all of them, though I know some online Brit friends who hated it and found inaccuracies. Of course they weren't aimed at the British reader and compared to the Hollywood version of the war in which one heroic American saves the world single handed, they were quite refreshing.

The one about the plague was OK too, though once you've read a few, she seems to repeat situations. Passage drove me bonkers, but I do find her books have a terrific narrative pull and I couldn't help reading to the end, despite becoming intensely irritated by the constant running around and avoiding people when one good conversation would have cleared up a lot of the misunderstandings.