(!!Warning, this review includes spoilers!!)

The title of this book is almost prescient of my experience with the book. It is classic (if unintended) bait and switch. Reading the synopsis one pictures a standard science fiction book: a science experiment goes wrong and puts our hero in an unfortunate situation. Due to his hard work, great luck, a cute girl, and by reversing the polarity of some piece of technobabble at the right time, he gets himself back where he wants to be . . . or he doesn’t and instead he and the girl are left alone at the dawn of time and forced to re-populate the entire Earth (worse things have happened. Better the girl than that alien we met in chapter 23, the one with the long orange tentacles).

One wouldn’t read the synopsis (which has changed since I first wrote this review) and expect to find oneself studying a well worn copy of ‘how to save a sewing business in ten easy lessons’ or ‘a girls guide to masturbation’.

I enjoy Mr. Golds writing style very engaging, and I and several other readers (who seem shy of writing reviews, unfortunately) await his new entries (which have been sporadic of late) with bated breath. He has come up with a fascinating tension, which he doles out to us in small dallops.

Unfortunately, there are IMO some serious issues with his plot and characterization, which lead to my low rating. Ironically, if he was a worse writer, I might rate him higher. But his engaging style, combined with what I see as some inexcusable errors, lead me to hold him to a higher standard than others.

My first criticism would be that Mr. Gold ignores the primary tensions of his plot and focus on the minor bits of extra fluff that we thought (and hoped) were just going to carry us on to the next important crisis.  In particular, major characters are forgotten for whole chapters, while minor ones take center stage; and things that could and should be hugely important are passed off with ‘I didn’t worry about that’ or are merely not mentioned at all. When one’s whole life had been turned upside down, one’s whole reality challenged and shattered, does it matter if we succeed in a play or in masturbating>

My second issue is that our hero, and many of his friends and relatives, seem singularly lacking in moral courage, initiative, and vision. Things which his readers, with their brief glimpse into the characters life, seem to figure out in half a page, the hero finds mystifying and a blur. He frequently finds the need for anyone but himself to take action and solve his little problem. And, when faced with hard choices, he wimps out and cries in a corner for mama (or rather, not for mama but for a mother substitute and deus ex machina who is the chief seamstress for a play he is in).

This weakness plays out most particularly when the hero needs to look within himself and make a decision about how to proceed, and then act this decision out: examining his own motives and feelings. The hero seems incapable either of honest introspection, or consistent action. One example would be that, for the whole book up until chapter 72 the hero (irrationally in my opinion, but that’s another issue) has attempted to keep his new status from his parents. In Chapter 73,  in a fit of emotion over a development he should have anticipated and which he (unjustifiably) took negative credit for, he blurts out his changed situation to his mother in the most irrational fashion possible . . . confusing her unnecessarily and failing to get the very help that such a revelation should have produced.

The other characters follow his lead. His father, for one brief glimpse, seems to rise above this and detect his continual deception, but then lapses back into the Disneyesque form of clueless parent who needs to be breastfed by his own children and other infinitely wise teenagers.

Russ also suffers, particularly in the beginning of the book (I notice an improvement as he writes more) under the pandemic writers plague of ‘telling not showing’. He has a hard time, especially in the first few chapters, of finding ways to let the story tell the story instead of the narrator.  Instead of the heroine blushing beet red and running screaming from the room when she walks naked into a room full of people, he has a tendency to have her say to herself, ‘this is very embarrassing’, and then spend four paragraphs of monologue telling herself just how embarrassing it is, and what she might want to do about it.

An example from an early chapter. In the middle of an important dialoged between our hero and his sister we read:

"So I backed up. I explained about Jared playing Giles and how Alvin had told us to get better acquainted. I explained the disastrous meeting at the Grill. At this point, Tina interrupted . . . "

At this point in the book (and you really have to read all the way to Chapter 40 to get the context) we are struggling with the relationship between our hero and his sister. We are very interested in this conversation, as it is a foundation stone for what one hopes to be a massive issue in his characterization.

Reading the above excerpt one wouldn’t know that the author is supposed to be (IMO) focusing on exactly how our main character communicates with his sister over a very difficult and emotional issue; one that had him in tears in the arms of his girlfriends (you had to be there) a few chapters back. One wouldn’t know that, here, the author is trying to build for us (we hope) a picture of his new relationship with his sister; and to revisit a dramatic scene in his past.

IMO the above four sentences need an entire chapter to themselves. The telling of, and emotional reaction to, the massively important scene above, is something I am very, very intrested in, and don’t wish to be summarized by ‘I explained".

One pictures JRR Tolkien revealing that, "Frodo and Sam had a difficult time getting to Mordor, but eventually they succeeded."

I am disappointed at the number of times that an issue is raised, only to be limply dropped. At one point we were poised to break into a professors office in search of information about his nefarious activities; only to have the idea dropped, limply, in the next chapter by being told that it was the wrong professor. Breaking into the office of the wrong professor can be funny, dramatic, or tragic. Not doing so because of being casually told that it is the wrong professor is . . . disappointing at best. A current chapter had the hero all worried that he might have to sleep with his sister and his cousin (sleep with as in . . . sleep, awkwardly crammed together as ‘girls’ in one bed . . . the kind of thing one does on sleepovers or at relatives.) However a few sentences later the hero’s sister casually mentions that there are two cots in a closet. Bang . . . tension gone . . . uselessly.

After such a stream of criticism you might expect I would stop reading. But, as I say, he writes very engagingly, and the deeper issues of the plot (assuming that they ever do get resolved) present some interesting moral and logical possibilities. I despair of meeting the alien with long orange tentacles that I expected in Chapter 23, but I still hold out hope for a new perspective on how to deal with a problematical situation. If only the hero would stop masturbating and start thinking . . . and start telling the truth and repairing the relationships he has devastated throughout the book.

Note: The book is now finished, with Mr. Gold moving on to other things. The ending was disappointing for me but, overall, I still think the book shows promise and is definitely worth a look.

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