Khanh the Killjoy

“I thought we were supposed to use time travel to help people,” I say. “I thought that’s what I did.”

He wheels around and aims a finger at me. “That’s not what you did. You played dress-up while you chased after some ridiculous teenage fantasy. You can’t make that much of an impact on the past. You can’t fall in love.”

I guess this is what you would call speculative fiction, because try as I might, I can't really make much sense of this book. There is plenty of time-hopping, as well as a supposedly compelling reason behind it. I couldn't see it. For me, the book's time-traveling premise felt more like a tool to showcase different time periods (and clothes! and parties!), and not the danger-packed events they should have been.

Plot aside, the main character is not a girl I admire. Alex Wayfare is selfish, she is truculent, she is thoughtless. She grew up somewhat during the length of the book, but by then, I had ceased to care.

The Summary: Alex Wayfare uses her "visions" as an excuse to be a horrible person. Ever since she was a child, she has had these "visions," in which she blacks out in real life, then sees herself transported through time to another reality in the past. Like one time, she blacks out and gets visions of herself in the Puritan Jamestown colony, during a long, hard winter.

The Jamestown settlers had to turn to cannibalism. It's not in the class textbook, but Alex saw it. Therefore it must be true. She writes an essay on the Jamestown cannibalism, surprise, surprise, she gets an F because IT WASN'T IN THE FUCKING TEXTBOOK. In revenge for her F, Alex humiliates her teacher in front of the entire school. Sounds totally fair, right?

His phone rings in his pocket. The vibrator motor stings his thigh, and he shrieks into the microphone. He actually shrieks. The ringtone peels thrtough the gym, the rapper rhyming about beating up his cheating girlfriend “because she deserved it” and dropping he F-bomb every other word. The entire student body bursts into howls of laughter.

And that's just one of the many bullshit acts she pulls because, you know, she has visions and all. Life is so fucking hard because it's not like everyone thinks she has epilepsy and pities her. Oh wait, they do.

During one of these "blackouts," Alex gets transported to the Roaring Twenties. She looks just like herself, only, you know, hotter, thinner.

Soft, wavy tendrils framed my face, gently brushing my red cheeks in the crisp autumn air. Everything else was the same – my nose, my lips, my chin – only I looked thinner, possibly two sizes smaller beneath that long wool coat.

Unlike other visions, Alex actually gets to STAY in this one. And boy, is it worth staying, cause there's "Blue." "Blue's" name's Nick, and he may be a gangster, but he's hot, so you know, who the fuck cares, lol. They nearly get shot. Yeah, you heard me.

It felt like ages before the gunfire stopped and the roadster sped away, but as soon as it did, Blue Eyes pulled me to my feet.

Before you know it, she's falling for Blue, because getting nearly shot together is such a "meet cute" moment. It's so sweet, they encounter gangsters together. Pshaw, who's worried about a bunch of Tommy-gun-wielding gangsters, anyway. Certainly not Alex!

Back home, I would’ve run for my life if I’d come face-to-face with a guy like him in an alley. But in this body, I wasn’t scared.

So yeah, FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!

Six to one. I didn’t know a damn thing about fighting, but I knew those weren’t good odds.
My feet were planted. And my fists craved contact. I was hungry for a fight, and somehow I knew I could hold my own.

Uh huh.

Thankfully, she is saved by an act known as deus ex fucking machina in which she blacks out JUST IN TIME to be saved from a gunshot.

Back in the present, Alex receives a cryptic message from an unknown man.

I’m not sure what I’m doing, following a cryptic flyer to meet some old guy I don’t know. I know a hundred different ways this meeting could take a turn for the worse.

You don't say? Surprise, surprise, Alex goes to meet him anyway. Thankfully, Alex doesn't end up being the victim of a serial killer, and she actually learns something about her time-traveling condition from a man, Porter.

As it turns out, Alex is rare. Different. Special.

“You’re the only one of your kind,” Porter says, making it sound like an honor. “The only reincarnated Descender. A Transcender."

She can travel through lives and past lives. Alex has had 56 previous lives. Before Porter could completely explain the concept of time travel to her, Alex is like lol, fuck it, I'm going to the past to see Blue. She travels back to the Roaring 20s to see her new squeeze.

You know that thing about not making an impact on the past, because it could affect the present? Alex says to that concept: FUCK YOU.

Using her past body, Alex does such compelling, important things as: get dolled up.

When Helena finished my makeup, I looked in her mirror and turned my chin to the left and right. A movie starlet stared back at me.

Porter yells at her to come back. She doesn't listen.

Porter’s voice elbowed its way inside my head, just as startling and unsettling as the first time.

Forget Porter's warnings, there are more important things to do. Like go to the Chicago Theater!

We stood outside the Chicago Theater, waiting in line under a huge, glittering marquee that read The Jazz Singer. My jaw dropped when I first saw it.

Not to mention spending a moonlit night on the rooftops of Chicago!

He helped me onto the roof, and we gazed out at the city, breathing in the night and listening to the distant street sounds. The stars seemed close enough to fog with your breath.

And Porter's voice yelling at her in her head? Fuck that shit, IGNORE HIM.

You need to come back now. I didn’t tell you the rules. You have to come back before you–
His words resonated inside my skull like the gong of a bell. I fought harder.
I struggled longer.
Porter was gone. Equal parts relief and guilt twisted inside me.

And she would have gone on partying like that until she got forcefully pulled back to the present. And Alex pouted like a little girl when she's told that she has to repair the damage of her presence in the past.

I stare at him like there are marbles spilling from his ears. “You can’t be serious. Everything I went through, everything that happened...You want me to erase it?”

He lifts his chin, daring me to defy him. “Yes.”

“But...” I grasp at straws, trying to delay the inevitable. “I didn’t sleep in until lunchtime. I landed at lunchtime.”

Now do you realize why I don't like Alex?

It turns out that there's a bigger plot at hand. There is an evil man out to kill Alex. Will she stop being a belligerent little bitch in time to save her own ass?

The Plot: Rambling. All over the damn place. That whole "Blue" arc was completely irrelevant and useless, and it took up almost half the fucking book. Alex gets to travel through her other past lives, several of them, and those events barely take up any notice in the book because they happen so quickly. This book is not so much the 57 Lives of Alex Wayfare, but more like the 3.25 lives of Alex Wayfare.

There is no danger, because the "past" seems more designed to be presented as a cool setting than anything relevant to the plot. We get to see her looking like "Marilyn Monroe" when she travels back to the 1960s. We get to see her on a cool train robbery in the 1870s. These time-traveling events do not feel like they made much impact on the plot, despite the fact that they are supposed to be crucial.

Alex: Frustratingly childish. She is so self-centered. She has no survival skills. In her everyday life, she uses her "I have visions" excuse to basically fail at life. And by that, I mean, she is failing 11th grade. She is intelligent, brilliant, but she uses her skills for petty revenge instead of anything noble.

“I may have posted a few of Tabitha’s personal text messages on the cafeteria’s scrolling message board...”

She is a disappointment to her family, and her family has enough hardships on their plate, like her sister, who is dying of leukemia.

Alex is the type who thinks that all adults are stupid, terrible people.

“Sadly, I haven’t met too many elders worthy of respect outside my family. Adults seem pissed off because of their life choices and take it out on us kids because, unlike them, we still have time; or they’re blind and forgot what it was like to be a kid so they try to put us in a glass box; or they’re jackasses just for the fun of it; or they’re blissfully ignorant of, like, everything."

SHe flaunts the rules, and is shocked and angry when she gets caught. She violates the very backbone of time-traveling rules. All for the sake of romance.

We don’t make an impact. But you?” His short laugh is dry and hollow. “You broke just about every rule we have – short of killing someone – on your first run. I think that must be some kind of record.”

The Premise: Honestly, it doesn't make much sense. The premise of time travel in this book is half fantasy, half sci-fi. We're just expected to believe that time travel is possible, and two scientists came to achieve it. No explanations given.

"And they were geniuses. But there was more to it than that. They had an upper hand. A secret weapon no one else knew about. They could travel back in time.”

...that's it. There are people who can travel back in time. Accept it, because no further explanations are given.

There's a lot of terminology thrown at us: Limbo, Transcenders, Descenders, Newlife, Base Life. It doesn't really make any sense, because there is no credible basis and explanation for the time travel except that, well, some people have it. It's a "maybe she's born it it, maybe it's Maybelline"-type of bullshittery. How did they manage it? Oh. Limbo.

“How did they travel?”
“By accessing Limbo.”
“Limbo? Like Dante’s Limbo?”
“Exactly, yes. Everyone passes through Limbo on their way to Afterlife when they die, but only a few can access Limbo while still alive."

...What? Um, ok.

Not recommended. Fuzzy logic, fuzzy concepts, an annoying character who is so self-centered that it takes away from the story.