The Time Before Now by Missouri Vaun

The Time Before Now by Missouri Vaun

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Ah shesh. heh. - A) seconds (minutes, or whatever) before 'it' happened, an event before the end of the book, I had the thought that 'the way two lesbians would, in this world, get a kid . . .' would be x. Then, seemingly immediately after that thought, x occurred. mmphs; B) a 'touching' Cheerekee story is told - problem is that I've heard/read that story way too often while still feeling annoyed about what all occurred just there at the end of the book.

But that seemed to be a theme of the book. Tragic events occur - beginning, middle, end. Weird overly dramatic events. That don't impact me the way they probably should. Like - in the beginning of the book, Elizabeth (side character) and Vivian (main character) had an affair. There was a massive amount of foreshadowing - the kind where the character herself, Vivian, was telling herself that she was being stupid and then . . . she's horribly horribly betrayed when the worst happened. Which, sadly, can be realistic - no matter how you prepare yourself for something, an event can still deeply negatively impact you. Reasonable for the character. For me the reader? I was mostly 'meh' about the issue.

Reoccurring theme. As noted. People bouncing along and . . tragedy! Each. Bloody. Turn. I think there might have been a section missing, that I either accidentally missed, or wasn't in my book - when Vivian crossed the Mississippi river - because she arrived thinking that she had nothing to trade. She was waiting to cross on the ferry. Now we are miles away. Um, wha? And Vivian feels bad about what happened 'back there'. I mention this because that specific river crossing seemed to be the only occasion in the book wherein something 'tragic' didn't get slipped in. Every bloody step of the way - tragedy. mmphs. Unrelenting tragedy. That I mostly felt meh about pre-during-post occurrence. Weird - that.

Another weird thing was I figured I'd begin this review talking about other stories I'd read that were like this one here - the kind like S.M. Stirlings that showed 'us' (as in the readers world) go into a disaster event, and then over the course of the series reach one or more generations later - the generations that don't even 'know' how the 'prior' world was really like - the kind of world where people entertained kids by telling them stories - recreating movies in oral bard like ways. Or, stories more like this one here - wherein some event occurred, and we, the readers, are picking things up a century or more after the fact.

These kinds of books can be neat. And this one also was 'neat'. It was also . . . overly determined to have every bloody moment have a scene of tragic importance in it. mmphs.

Rating: 3.64

February 6 2017



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