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High school English teacher Jake Epping travels to the past in order to stop the assassination of JFK. While biding his time in a small Texas town (his jaunts always begin on the same date in 1958), he falls in love with a school librarian. If that sounds as though it might be two entirely different books, it isn't without reason. In fact, the first third of this 842 page whopper is largely unnecessary and could have been a book in itself, it's certainly long enough. So, this is really three books: one (the best of the three) is set in Derry, Maine, the setting of the author's It (Jake even meets a couple of characters from that book), and establishes the rules of time travel; the second involves the assassination, in which King clearly has no interest (Jake knows next to nothing about it going in and learns nothing new along the way); and the third book is a "nostalgic" paean to mid-century romance (the quotation marks are deserved, for King's small-town characters exhibit awfully modern, big-city ideas). King claims to have read a stack of books taller than himself about the assassination, but you'd never know it; his real research was the period, and evidence of that fairly drips from every page. Still, with his treacly characters and his skill at emotional manipulation, many will no doubt love this book.
High school English teacher Jake Epping travels to the past in order to stop the assassination of JFK. While biding his time in a small Texas town (his jaunts always begin on the same date in 1958), he falls in love with a school librarian. If that sounds as though it might be two entirely different books, it isn't without reason. In fact, the first third of this 842 page whopper is largely unnecessary and could have been a book in itself, it's certainly long enough. So, this is really three books: one (the best of the three) is set in Derry, Maine, the setting of the author's It (Jake even meets a couple of characters from that book), and establishes the rules of time travel; the second involves the assassination, in which King clearly has no interest (Jake knows next to nothing about it going in and learns nothing new along the way); and the third book is a "nostalgic" paean to mid-century romance (the quotation marks are deserved, for King's small-town characters exhibit awfully modern, big-city ideas). King claims to have read a stack of books taller than himself about the assassination, but you'd never know it; his real research was the period, and evidence of that fairly drips from every page. Still, with his treacly characters and his skill at emotional manipulation, many will no doubt love this book.
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