Joyce Carol Oates

An ingenious, dystopian novel of one young woman’s resistance against the constraints of an oppressive society, from the inventive imagination of Joyce Carol Oates “Time travel” — and its hazards—are made literal in this astonishing new novel in which a recklessly idealistic girl dares to test the perimeters of her tightly controlled (future) world and is punished by being sent back in time to a region of North America — “Wainscotia, Wisconsin”—that existed eighty years before. Cast adrift in time in this idyllic Midwestern town she is set upon a course of “rehabilitation”—but cannot resist falling in love with a fellow exile and questioning the constrains of the Wainscotia world with results that are both devastating and liberating. Arresting and visionary, Hazards of Time Travel is both a novel of harrowing discovery and an exquisitely wrought love story that may be Joyce Carol Oates’s most unexpected novel so far.

A Novel

Hazards of Time Travel

Good subtle sf-theme story. Not much 'happens', but there should be some things in here for the concerned reader to consider. 

Dr Dee

2.5 stars, rounded down because as I wrote this review, I got pissed off haha. Each section gets a different rating from me. 

Section 1: 4 stars. Great set-up, interesting concepts introduced. A few too many acronyms to keep up with, but memorization (or lack of) of these terms didn't impact my understanding of what was happening. Adriane was a bit stupid and naive, but I guess that's to be expected.

Section 2: 2.5 stars. The first part of this longest section maintained the momentum of the first section, and was really interesting as she started to navigate the university culture in 1959. However, this quickly went downhill as soon as she declared she was "in love" with her professor. This absolutely TANKED the book for me, because she spent the rest of this LOOOONG section pining over him and having an inappropriate relationship with him. After this began, the only good thing that happened was (view spoiler)[Wolfman getting vaporized at the very end. (hide spoiler)]

Section 3: 2 stars. I hoped the last section would be better, but sadly it wasn't. This section was very short and felt incredibly rushed. (view spoiler)[With Adriane losing her memory and truly becoming Mary Ellen, and just up and marrying Jamie (who ALSO is over 10 years her senior!!) and committing to life in 1960, I felt really disappointed. No return to her present, no more info about how her world has changed or how she has changed, etc. ALSO...her uncle Toby was supposedly vaporized, so how was he alive in exile-land? If he was actually exiled, how was he allowed to have children and such? Too many loose ends that the author just decided to let hang, I guess. (hide spoiler)] 

What even was the point of this book? What was its purpose? It seemed like there was some half-baked psychological point about behaviorism in this book, but it was too bogged down in the love story to mean anything to me. The book was totally toothless for being partially dystopian, and pretty boring for being a time travel book. It was pretty much a miss for me.

(Also on an unrelated note, I detected an undercurrent of racism from the author...unsure if it was just meant to be appropriate for the time period or if it was actually the author's views slipping in)

Jeremy Cote

** spoiler alert **
           I thought this book had a ton of potential. In fact, I really enjoyed most of the story, until perhaps the last twenty percent of it. Then. I was simply confused about what was going on, and I didn't feel like the story was explained to me. This is unfortunate, because I thought the concept and the writing was quite intriguing. I was pulled throughout the whole story to learn more, but I just couldn't make sense of the ending. It might just be me, but I couldn't make sense of it. Because of that, I've lowered my rating.

I want to reiterate: the whole concept was very novel to me and I wanted to explore it further. I was simply a bit let down by the ending.

Hazards of Time Travel A Novel

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