Time Squared by Lesley Krueger
This one is more about my journey and less about the review, but we can do both.
Time Squared works to explore women's agency across different eras. Eleanor and Robin meet in 1811, but Eleanor begins experiencing memories of other lives, revealing a mental time-jumping she calls 'glimpses.' As Robin fights in various wars, Eleanor lives through different struggles of her own. The novel delves into the roles, power, and stresses women face throughout history and their impact on relationships.
When I randomly started this audiobook from Everand, Time Squared was sporting a baffling (at the time) rating of 2.62, averaged from 1,785 ratings. When I took note of this, I said on my Instagram story: I'm enjoying it so far (at 25%), and this would have to take a sharp left turn into Crazytown at this point to warrant such a low rating on Goodreads.
Then I went through some of the reviews. Most of the 1-star reviews I ran across were DNFs, which...I guess that's a personal decision, but I don't rate my DNFs...so those are ignorable — for the most part — to me. The 'for most part' element being that as I neared the halfway point, I could see the reasoning for abandoning the book as a DNF.
This is a marketing issue on top of issues with the book itself. Let's dive in.
The author blurb likens this book to Life After Life meets Never Let Me Go, and while I can definitely see hints of the former in loose terms, the latter is a stretch. Now, the name and the title itself play roles here. And basically, most people are going into this expecting some element of sci-fi or sc-fi-adjacent time travel. That's not this book.
Over more than the first half of the book is set in the 1800s. Granted, as I looked into this by reviewing the audiobook, it must be noted that it is hard to pull apart the 1800s periods as separate and stand alone from the others, especially with the audiobook. My thoughts while listening were that the 1800s periods were one full and complete setting, two at the most. Because Eleanor is almost always surrounded by the same people and interested in the same man, and they all have the nearly the exact same name every time, it is incredibly hard to decipher the lives as distinct and detached. Time Squared hits about 13 different time 'Eleanor eras,' ranging from as early as 61 AD and as late as 2019.
In the end, I found this one to suffer from some pretty heavy identity, marketing, and structural issues. The themes covered were pretty evident as we went along, but even those became messy and confused with the romance element stirred in through various angles at different times. I was pretty invested in finding out the root of Eleanor's glimpses until it started becoming clearer what these were, and as the end rolled neared I grew rightly suspicious that this would use an element I have come to loathe — in film and books. It did.
Audiobook, as narrated by Helen Taylor: Taylor did a great job — this was a confusingly anchored book for audio format, and any issues I had were not related to Taylor's narration.
