Escape in Time by Robyn Nyx

Escape in Time by Robyn Nyx

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


To a certain extent, I am glad that I am not among the first to have read this book. I know there’d be people who would like this book (current, 20170503 overall rating: 4.29), and I wouldn’t want to keep people away from a book. Since, I just didn’t like the book. Largely because the book wasn’t what I thought it was going to be.

I’ve eye-balled this book since I first became aware of it months ago. Things I like reading about: 1) time travel; 2) history; 3) WWII; 4) lesbians. Things that I do not really like reading about: 1) angry fucking; 2) lots and lots of angst; 3) graphic depictions of a violent/torturous/abusive nature; 4) cliffhanger endings; 5) ‘bonus’ graphic (of a torture kind) scenes by characters never before meet. This book had all nine.

I thought this book would be an interesting time travel book that bounced around time (or, since this is in fact a series (based on ‘The Extractor Series’ written on the book cover), bouncing around in one ‘non-present to the main characters’ time line. It was that. But it also was so much more – of the worse kind of more.

With the possible exception of Jade Carter (who one of the main characters lust after), and possibly Ilse (somewhat less her than Jade since we get even less time spent with her; Ilse is the one the other main character lusts after), every character in this book falls into the ‘hard to like’ category. There are the two main characters, both with point of views, Landry Donovan (who gets called Landry so often in the book that the few times that she’s called Donovan, I had to look around to see who they were talking about) who is an ‘extractor’ (the one who has the ‘recall unit’ (not the name used in the book) that allows people to travel ‘back to the present’ and normally doesn’t spend as much time in the past as the operatives), and Jacqulyn Delaney (first name as spelled in book description), one of the time travel operatives – the kind who spend years ‘in position’ so that the mission can be accomplished. Both have certain things ‘messed up’ about them. Landry has literally two different sets of memories in her that play games with her mind (somewhat) – the set of memories wherein her mom died, and the set where she didn’t (more on that later*). Delaney (and why one gets called by their last name all the time and the other by her first name is unknown to me; the fact that Delaney’s first name is Jacqulyn is another of those little moments where that actually got used and I had to take a moment to remember who that was) is suffering from several issues – the desire to numb herself with lots and lots of alcohol – and the reason for her desire to numb herself – being burnt out; being in love with someone who only sees them as a convenient fuck buddy; and constant emotional pain from the stuff they had to do to stay in character during missions.

Then there are those characters without points of view – the sadistic (and occasional non-sadistic) Nazis; the self-serving, know-it-all Pulsus top brass (Pulsus being the organization handling the time traveling stuff; self-serving – a lot of the missions that they conduct seem suspiciously self-serving (1) first mission saved the girlfriend of the head Pulsus person (and, the same person, the mother of Landry* (by saving her own mother from an early death, Landry now has the memories she had before she saved her mother, and, superimposed on those, she has the memories of her still living mother); 2) another mission is set up to save one of the 30+ victims of a serial killer (just like the millions left to die during the holocaust for the ‘benefit’ of saving just one during the prime mission in this book; here only one person is selected to be saved – a friend of the head of Pulsus). And no, the reason for saving one person here, one person there, etc. is not some kind of ‘preserve the present’ mandate but . . . not exactly sure what follows the ‘but’ other than ‘selfishness’. How can you tell? Because the stuff that they do, the changes that they do make, keep having large changes on the ‘present’. Mind you, one of the main characters notices this and wishes to ‘do something’ about it, so . . that’s going on as well.

Hmm. I got distracted there with my little ‘insight’ into the top Pulsus people. Right, so, other characters: the brutal/sadistic Pulsus Operative Simson (sp?) who is another of Delaney’s fuck buddies and who seems to be the kind who would enjoy going back in time to be a concentration camp guard during WWII; and the family who live ‘on the mainland’ in the apartment below Landry's (Pulsus, and most of the Pulsus personal, live on an island off the coast of California) – all three of whom had personality traits that annoyed me (one is pushy and gives out way too much information; another is . . . well, I do not specifically recall why the other two annoyed me). Then there’s the mother – the little seen of her in the book is not endearing.

Right, my brain is now hurting from lunch, so I’ll hurry away. Did I like this book? Not really, no. Will I read the sequel(s)? Probably not. Did I like the characters? For the most part, no. Did I like the part where the book ended on an almost literal cliff-hanger (but for the fact that a few extra moments were spent after the cliff scene), and then was followed up by an epilogue starring two characters who had, as far as the reader knows, nothing to do with the book or series (presumably do with second book in series), just so that extra graphic scenes of a torturous nature could be added to the book? No.

Graphic Depictions of Sex? Yes
Graphic Depictions of torture and violence? Yes

Rating: 2.25

May 3 2017




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