Monday, December 17, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Time's Children by D.B. Jackson




Time's Children is the first in a new series, the Islevale Cycle, by author DB Jackson, featuring a fantasy world and the impact of time travel.  I honestly don't read a lot of time travel stories (this is I think the third book this year, and the first to be more than 200 pages long) but Islevale differs from the usual such story by having the time travel be in a fantasy world.  More than that, it features a very interesting version of time travel as well as an interesting overall magic system to fill up this fantasy world.

The problem is that for all that worldbuilding, Time's Children never quite gets enough of its plot going to be a satisfying experience.  It's a 500 page book in paperback that is very much the first novel in a series, and somehow it doesn't get enough page-length to really explore some of the concepts it sets up.  These concepts remain fascinating as a whole, and the characters and plot are interesting enough that I do want to read onwards, but it's a frustrating way to finish a book.  Thankfully the sequel will be out in under six months.


-------------------------------------------------Plot Summary-----------------------------------------------
Tobias is a 15 year old young man, training as a Traveler on the neutral Island of Trevynisle in the world of Islevale.  "Travelers" are humans with the magical ability to travel through time and space - with the help of magical devices, but Tobias is not a mere Crosser (able to walk through walls) or Spanner (who can travel in a blink of an eye through great distances) - he is a Walker, able to walk back in time and then return.  But walking is not a safe skill, for every moment a Walker goes back in time is another moment his body ages.  As such, the laws of the use of Walkers forbids those who pay for the use of Walkers to send them back further than a year at a time.

But when Tobias is sent to the Court of Daerjen, he is asked to go far beyond that - back 14 years, inr order to convince the King not to go to war against two foreign powers, including the Court of Oaqamaran - as Daerjan is losing the wars.  But the Oaqamaran King has his own uses for the powers of travelers and when Tobias goes back in time he finds things going badly wrong and the imeline disastrously changed as a result, with nearly the entire Royal Family of Daerjen assassinated.

Now 29 in body but still a teenager in mind, Tobias must protect the infant princess of Daerjan, Sofya, from forces that seek to kill her.  To do so he will need to get help from allies, including potentially sinister demons of Time and Space who have their own agendas, and even then he is badly out of his depth.  But there is no one else to help him ensure that the future doesn't turn into something badly badly wrong.
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Time's Children has some wonderful worldbuilding, with magic of multiple types, a very different fantasy worlds, and magical creatures all being involved here.  The book does a great job explaining the differences and consequences of various magics, as well as the various types of demons, so that this very different world with very different mechanics never feels overwhelming.  Its a setting that is definitely engrossing and really interesting to see as it develops.

Our lead character Tobias is a fun hero to follow as he's so prideful in his abilities at the start and quickly finds himself out of his depth, but his strong sense of right and wrong keeps him going.  The protagonists are rounded up with the time demon Droe, who is struggling with the idea of loving Tobias, and the young woman Mara who is in love with Tobias at the start before things begin to change, and each of this trio works well enough, although none of them are spectacular.  Most interesting are honestly two antagonists, a husband and wife in the service of the evil empire, in which the wife is another Walker, and the strain of their relationship being affected by her power is very fascinating to read.  And then there's the relationship between them as one changes time periods without the other....I'd really like to read more about them than even the leads, despite them being on the wrong side.

The Problem with Time's Children is mainly that it has some major pacing problems, as it takes oh so long to set everything up with its worldbuilding before events start to happen.  The reader, if they've read the plot summary before buying, will be waiting for an event to occur that doesn't happen for around 150 pages, and by the end of this ~500 page book, we end on a cliffhanger ending that doesn't resolve pretty much anything, leaving everything for the next books in the series.  Even the events of the FIRST chapter of this book are never followed up upon - hooray for time travel.  The good thing about this book is that what was included in the 500 pages did leave me wanting more....but providing no satisfaction for completing this book is a major frustration.

A secondary problem, related to the first, is that Time's Children really doesn't spend enough time dealing with the ramifications of its interesting version of time travel.  Tobias loses 14 years of his life and is in a 29 year old body for most of the book and this has basically no impact on the plot as Tobias is always on the run and the book never stops to deal with it.  Oddly, this time travel problem is better handled for the antagonists as I mentioned above.  It's a bit of a miss.
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