{Synopsis} – WHAT IF you could go back in time and change the course of history? WHAT IF the watershed moment you could change was the JFK assassination? 11/22/63, the date that Kennedy was shot – unless …King takes his protagonist Jake Epping, a high school English teacher from Lisbon Falls, Maine, 2011, on a fascinating journey back to 1958 – from a world of mobile phones and iPods to a new world of Elvis and JFK, of Plymouth Fury cars and Lindy Hopping, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life – a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time. With extraordinary imaginative power, King weaves the social, political and popular culture of his baby-boom American generation into a devastating exercise in escalating suspense.
{My thoughts} – Jake Epping is your typical high school English teacher that seems to be pre-destined for greater things. He is a regular patron at a diner run by a guy named Al Templeton.
One day Al decides he needs to hand pick someone that can carry on the mission that he has spent a great deal of his life trying to fulfill. It turns out that he chooses Jake to take on an enormous responsibility.
However, as we all know with great responsibility there can also be drastic consequences. Al introduces Jake to a time warp point that he calls the rabbit hole. It always goes back to the same day in history and each time you come out and back to the present and then return it resets back to the same fixed point in history. Also, you can spend years there, but in the present you’ve only been gone for two minutes.
Let’s think about this rabbit hole. The fixed point never changes, it’s always the same each time you return. However, anything in history that happens after that point your able to both witness and possibly change. The only problem is that there could be a possible butterfly effect to any point in history. Therefore, making changes might be at your advantage or disadvantage when it comes to the future, but you won’t know the full effect until you go back to the present through the rabbit hole.
If you could change anything in history, would you? This book shows you what can happen if you make a change to some small events in history as well as a larger scaled event. The larger scaled event is the prevention of the assassination of President Kennedy.
When Jake accomplishes his goal and or mission and goes back to the present, he learns there were dire consequences to the changes that he’d made in the past. He also knows that all he has to do to erase those changes is to pop back in and out of the rabbit hole again. The question we are left with is, does he go back and erase all his hard work? Does he decide to live in the past? What did the changes he made in the past end up doing to the future?
I have to admit that this book has intrigued my interest since it was first published. I usually stay away from books by authors that are well known for writing some spooky stuff. This book was spooky. It was an interesting take on time travel and gas got me thirsting for my books by Stephen King. I really never thought I’d see the day I’d be interested in a King book, but that say came. It was a difficult book to put down and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
I highly recommend this book for anyone that likes reading about time travel, likes Stephen King’s writing, and is interested in the what if type things that could gave happened had events in the past played out differently then they’d played out.
{Quotes I Enjoyed} –
{1} If I’d known what the future held for me, I certainly would have gone up to see her. I might even have given her the kiss that had been flirting in the air between us for the last couple of months. But of course I didn’t know. Life turns on a dime.
{2} “It’ll take as long as you want,” he said, “Because it’ll only take two minutes. It always takes two minutes.”
{3} “Two minutes. I told you, it’s always two minutes. No matter how long you stay.” … “And when you go down the steps, it’s always 11:58 A.M. on the morning of September ninth, 1958. Every trip is a first trip.”
{4} “Human things are terrific right to the end, it seems like. I never would have guessed.”
{5} “I think it’s as much a freak of nature as Old Faithful, or that weird balancing rock they’ve got in Western Australia, or a river that runs backward at certain phases of the moon. Things like that are delicate, buddy. A little shift in the earth’s crust, a change in the temperature, a few sticks of dynamite, and their gone.”
{6} I’m crazy, I thought. Crazy and having a terribly involved hallucination in a mental hospital somewhere. Perhaps some doctor will write me up for a psychiatric journal. Instead of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, I’ll be The Man Who Thought He Was in 1963.
{7} If I did damage, I could undo it, because every trip was a reset. You could say that time-travel came with a built-in safety switch.
{8} “When you put on a clown suit and a rubber nose, nobody has any idea what you look like inside.”
{9} “Clowns joke around a lot, too,” I said. … “That doesn’t make them nice.”
{10} If he ran at me, that would be good. I’d be like a rodeo clown, distracting the bull. I’d caper and yell until he got in range, then put two in his chest.
{11} Want to know something funny? Even people capable of living in the past don’t really know what the future holds.
{12} But the past is as fragile as a butterfly’s wing. Or a house of cards.
{13} Do your best and let God do the rest is just one of the many sayings Christy dragged back from her AA meetings.
{14} Dumb. But stupidity is one of two things we see most clearly in retrospect. The other is missed chances.
{15} Want to know the best thing about teaching? Seeing that moment when a kid discovers his or her gift. There’s no feeling like it.
{16} There are guys who can’t rid themselves of the idea that acting is for girls and queers who sort of wish they were girls.
{17} “I enjoyed the stuff about the killer dressed up as a clown. Call me twisted, but I found that deliciously creepy.”
{18} If you’ve ever been homesick, or felt exiled from all the things and people that once defined you, you’ll know how important welcoming words and friendly smiles can be.
{19} Life turns on a dime. Sometimes towards us, but more often it spins away, flirting and flashing as it goes: so long, honey, it was good while it lasted, wasn’t it?
{20} We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why. Not until the future eats the present, anyway. We know when it’s too late.
{21} History repeats itself is another way of saying the past harmonizes.
{22} One of Christy’s AA slogans came to mind: FEAR, standing for false evidence appearing real.
{23} The AA’s say FEAR stands for something else, as well: Fuck Everything and Run.
{24} “It was a Japanese proverb. ‘If there is love, smallpox scars are as pretty as dimples.”
{25} In dark times when even the sages are uncertain, declarations of love always do.
{26} Time is a tree with many branches.
{27} “I can love you if you’re a man, and I can love you if you’re a hero – I guess, although for some reason that seems a lot harder 0 but I don’t think I can love a vigilante.”
{28} The past has resonance, it echoes.
{29} “When you try to change the past, it bites. It’ll tear your throat out if you give it the chance.”
{30} The past fought change because it was destructive to the future.
{31} We’re all mad her was what the Cheshire Cat told Alice. Then he disappeared. Except for the grin, that is. As I recall, the grin stayed awhile.
{32} Here’s another thing I do know. The past is obdurate for the same reason a turtle’s shell is obdurate: because the living flesh inside is tender and defenseless.
Final Conclusion: 5 Star Rating.
