The Psychology of Time Travel (Karen Mascarenhas)

The Psychology of Time Travel
Karen Mascarenhas
Crooked Lane Books
Fiction, Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: In the late 1960's, four brilliant women made a breakthrough in time travel, becoming the first humans to travel forward and backwards and even meet themselves... but only three went on to enjoy the fruits of their labors. Barbara suffered an apparent mental breakdown after their early tests, and was quietly cut loose to "recover" (and not serve as a PR liability while time travel was becoming established). Many decades later, "Granny Bee"'s adult granddaughter Ruby finds a cryptic message, possibly from a former colleague: a notice about a future inquest into a murder. Is it a warning - and, if so, who is the victim?
In early 2018, college student Odette, volunteering at a toy museum, makes a grisly discovery in the basement: a body, riddled with bullets, inside a locked room - a room locked from within, with no other access. The police seem to suspect her, suspicions likely tied to her skin tone, but without proof can do nothing... but something doesn't add up about the incident, driving Odette to distraction. When she decides to dig into the incident on her own, she finds connections to Ruby and the founders of time travel, and discovers the dark secrets hiding behind the shining public facade.

REVIEW: I will give this marks for dealing, at least in part, with exactly what the title describes. This book is not so much about the how of time travel (handwaved away) or the problems with paradoxes, but about time travel affects people who do it, and those around them. Though the "Conclave", as the time travel organization comes to be know, is public - unlike some time travel books, where it's a military secret, the foursome went public with their breakthroughs early on, and indeed have capitalized on time travel in all manner of fields, even selling toy "candy conjurer boxes" that transport sweets about a minute into the future as children's party novelties - the inner workings of the organization remain opaque to outsiders, allowing an increasingly toxic culture to develop among travelers. Barbara's breakdown (and subsequent embarrassing display during the first BBC interview) drives project head Margaret to increasingly drastic measures trying to weed out future "problems", even endorsing unofficial bullying and hazing in an effort to strip travelers of potentially detrimental emotional connections. That this culture leads to a murder is almost inevitable. Mascarenhas put a fair bit of thought into how traveling through time, seeing dead relatives alive again in their pasts or seeing the fates of cities and nations in the far future, knowing whom one will marry (or divorce) before one even meets them, would affect a species evolved to experience events in a linear fashion.
Unfortunately, in order to really engage with any story, to enjoy it, I have to be able to connect in some way with at least one character. Even if I don't like them, I should find something about them interesting. To be blunt, I didn't like anyone in this book, and only occasionally found them of interest. They started feeling like women's fiction stereotypes, frankly, despite their intelligence and degrees and pioneering work in time travel, too often reverting back to being all about finding a life partner or dealing with parent-child bonds and/or friction. It felt flattening for some reason, that even unlocking the key to time itself really doesn't really matter because womanhood's about mating and mothering. The locked-room mystery of the murder and its time travel ties becomes buried, and several potentially interesting ideas are left unexplored or underutilized.
By the end, I'd lost most of my interest in the resolution of the mystery and the various relationships, and the concept of time travel itself. I wound up giving it the extra half-star for truth in advertising, and for some of the interesting ideas about how the psychology of time travelers might shift as they come to feel increasingly distant from (and superior to) the rest of their kind.

You Might Also Enjoy:
Timeline (Michael Crichton) - My Review
One Word Kill (Mark Lawrence) - My Review
Just One Damned Thing After Another (Jodi Taylor) - My Review