Title: Just one damned thing after another
Author: Jodi Taylor
Genre: science fiction, time travel
Pages: 322
Publisher: Night Shade
Goodreads rating: 3.89
My rating: 1
Trigger Warning: sexual assault, s*x scenes, death, blood, war, curse words.
Synopsis:
“History is just one damned thing after another.” —Arnold Toynbee
Behind the seemingly innocuous facade of St. Mary’s Institute of Historical Research, a different kind of academic work is taking place. Just don’t call it “time travel”—these historians “investigate major historical events in contemporary time.” And they aren’t your harmless eccentrics either; a more accurate description, as they ricochet around history, might be unintentional disaster-magnets.
The first thing you learn on the job at St. Mary’s is that one wrong move and history will fight back—sometimes in particularly nasty ways. But, as new recruit Madeleine Maxwell soon discovers, it’s not only history they’re often fighting.
The Chronicles of St. Mary’s tells the chaotic adventures of Max and her compatriots—Director Bairstow, Leon “Chief” Farrell, Mr. Markham, and many more—as they travel through time, saving St. Mary’s (too often by the very seat of their pants) and thwarting time-travelling terrorists, all the while leaving plenty of time for tea.
From eleventh-century London to World War I, from the Cretaceous Period to the destruction of the Great Library at Alexandria, one thing is for sure: wherever the historians at St. Mary’s go, chaos is sure to follow in their wake.
Review with spoiler:
This is one of the worst books I ever read, and one of the most stupid. I wasn’t thinking that for the first 4 or 5 chapters: it wasn’t a well-written story, and all the characters were acting like a teen, but the idea behind the story was interesting, and I found myself reading out of curiosity.
But then I began to see the fall of the plot: the basic rule in every story about time travel is “do not change the past”, but this rule doesn’t apply to our MC. All the science fiction parts of this book are done approximately, and we read this story like: ok that doesn’t make sense.
The historian of the St. Mary institute are sent to the past just to observe the situation but:
- They died. A lot.
- Our MC saves a couple of lives during WWI and nobody cares.
- And the future doesn’t change!
- They didn’t send the historian to the period he/she has a degree, they send them randomly.
- We really need to talk about the final exam.
- Like she’s just drinking tea and has done nothing and she has passed the exam.
- They are sent in a dangerous era without weapons.
These are some of the things that I found stupid in this book, but nothing compares to the s*x scene randomly placed after a car accident. So they are like friends, he’s driving a car, she makes a dirty joke and he BAM, crush the car against a tree. He calls for help, then “take off your clothes and we make it on the car that is destroyed.” I was–>
really, that books keep goes worse every page you turn.
The characters are all historian with degrees in a specific era and they act like teenagers; the plot behind the time travel is so bad I want to cry; the sexual scenes and assault are totally amiss; even the parts in the past are annoying.
The writing style is very elementary, the dialogue is so bland.
There’s nothing except the cover that I will save about this book. I’m sorry. Please don’t be offended if you liked it, this is only my opinion.
Fortunately, the book 