11/22/63
Ratings738
Average rating4.3
Not just a time travel book.
A man is shown a portal back into 1958 but no matter how long you stay in the past, the portal always brings you back to two minutes after left in the present. The man who shows it to him had tried to stop the assassination of JFK but became too ill and came back to find somebody else to take on the task. So Jake takes Al's comprehensive notes of the movements of Lee Harvey Oswald and goes back to stop him.
Jake does a test run, preventing a different tragedy that effected a friend of his in his distant childhood. He returns to find unexpected consequences for changing that kid's life. A twist of this portal is that each time you go back in time it resets all your changes back to the original, so he goes back to find a different way to save his friend, and to stay there from 1958 to 1963 and stop Oswald.
We get a look at the horrors of life for many people in the southern US states in that era, the racism, the sexism, the poverty. And Jake meets a pretty woman and his life of tracking Oswald gets intertwined with a love story. Once again Jake imagines he can do another reset and fix a tragedy in this woman's life, but it means starting the whole thing over again.
He also discovers that 'the past does not want to be changed' as things suddenly pop up to prevent him from taking the next planned step. And he finds 'harmonies' as other things repeat. 'That car is the same as the car in another city'. That kind of coincidence. Trouble is, sometimes that car really is the car from an earlier encounter.
As the day 11.22.63 approaches things speed up. There is more disruption and the day itself becomes totally chaotic.
No spoilers here, but a few days after everything is over Jake finds his way back to the portal. It's changed after the five years he's been in the past. And when he at last gets back to the present he finds a dystopian world of nuclear war, earthquakes, social breakdown and violence.
That past the didn't want to be changed? It meant business.
Not just a time travel book.
A man is shown a portal back into 1958 but no matter how long you stay in the past, the portal always brings you back to two minutes after left in the present. The man who shows it to him had tried to stop the assassination of JFK but became too ill and came back to find somebody else to take on the task. So Jake takes Al's comprehensive notes of the movements of Lee Harvey Oswald and goes back to stop him.
Jake does a test run, preventing a different tragedy that effected a friend of his in his distant childhood. He returns to find unexpected consequences for changing that kid's life. A twist of this portal is that each time you go back in time it resets all your changes back to the original, so he goes back to find a different way to save his friend, and to stay there from 1958 to 1963 and stop Oswald.
We get a look at the horrors of life for many people in the southern US states in that era, the racism, the sexism, the poverty. And Jake meets a pretty woman and his life of tracking Oswald gets intertwined with a love story. Once again Jake imagines he can do another reset and fix a tragedy in this woman's life, but it means starting the whole thing over again.
He also discovers that 'the past does not want to be changed' as things suddenly pop up to prevent him from taking the next planned step. And he finds 'harmonies' as other things repeat. 'That car is the same as the car in another city'. That kind of coincidence. Trouble is, sometimes that car really is the car from an earlier encounter.
As the day 11.22.63 approaches things speed up. There is more disruption and the day itself becomes totally chaotic.
No spoilers here, but a few days after everything is over Jake finds his way back to the portal. It's changed after the five years he's been in the past. And when he at last gets back to the present he finds a dystopian world of nuclear war, earthquakes, social breakdown and violence.
That past the didn't want to be changed? It meant business.
