August 2022 Bookclub: Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus

 

My rating: 2.5 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Historical Fiction, Sci-fi, Fantasy
Content: Talk of raping women, An off page rape and murder, People being sold into slavery

 

In the not-too-distant future, a major scientific breakthrough has created a way to open windows into the past, and a scientist believes she can alter human history from a tragedy of bloodshed and brutality to a world of hope and healing.

This was our book club book this month. It's sort of a sci-fi/fantasy, with the time travel and the Pastwatch organization, but leans very heavily toward historical fiction. I found parts of this to be interesting and other parts to be downright boring. The beginning engaged me enough and so did the end, but it sagged in the middle. I enjoyed history when I was in school, but I'm not a fan of novels that are about real people, and all that entails. I'm also long past wanting to spend my recreational reading time on history in general, and this was too heavy on the history and too light on the sci-fi and fantasy. 

There's a whole lot of philosophy and speculation in this book and those are the parts that bored me the most. I thought there would be more adventure, but there wasn't. It was mostly a lot of talking. I personally like time travel stories that have a lot happening in them with the time travel itself, and the direct and indirect consequences of it. This really had none of that, and I honestly wasn't all that interested in reading about the subject matter. There were some points brought up that resonated with me and made me think, and a couple of the characters were engaging, but I'm not sure I liked everything about their solution to "fixing" the past. I think one of the things I disliked most about this book was all the manipulating that went on. I can also think of a lot of other events in history that they could go back and fix as well, some of which I think would have been more compelling to read about.

If you liked Doomsday Book, you might like this. It felt similar in some ways, mainly the time travel to way back in history and the heavy historical fiction aspect of it.