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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A convincing portrayal of a m aligned king, October 5, 2009
This review is from: This Time (Perfect Paperback)
That's All She Read,[...]
I caught the Richard III bug after reading Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time like everyone else. So I wasn't surprised when I learned of Joan Szechtman's new novel, This Time, which uses a device of fiction well suited to solving the mysteries character assassinating public relations created about Shakespeare's villain. That is, bring Richard in and ask him.
In the novel a wealthy businessman who is a member of the Portland, Oregon Richard III Society decides to scoop the world by bringing the fifteenth century English monarch to the present day. Richard awakes from seconds before his death at Bosworth Field to find himself in a brightly lit room on a hospital bed listening to two men talking in a variant of English he does not recognize. Being by nature intelligent and adaptable, he, with the help of a linguist who is also a Ricardian, acclimatizes as quickly as might be expected to the world 500 years after his own time. Complicating his adjustment the businessman responsible for his trip to 2004 may be planning to send him back, creating a cloak and dagger effort to prevent this by the linguist, the physics whiz, and others who know to do so would be murder. We follow Richard through first this intrigue and then through his desire to use the science that brought him to today to bring his wife and son here too.
This story could be clumsy, contrived, even embarrassing. It is none of these. It is a surprisingly believable and sensitive bit of writing that drew me in and made me unable to put it down. First of all, the portrayal of Richard is affectionate but not idolatrous. Szzechtman knows her protagonist well and built him and his situation into something entirely credible. Though the quest to solve the mysteries of his life, in particular the fate of the "princes in the Tower", is what brought him to now, this Richard is less concerned about his reputation than in being a good and honorable man in his present life. The science is handled with intelligence and a light touch so that the reader can accept its plausibility.
There was one major problem in the novel in my mind. When after hearing from the linguist that her friend "flies up from San Francisco on a regular basis, Richard reacts "He can fly?!" While a perfect example of the humor in this already enjoyable novel, it got me looking forward to reading about his own first experience of air travel. It didn't come. I asked the author about this, and she explained that she had cut the entire subplot of his trip to see a "creature works" lab. The experience of being on a jet is just so far outside anyone's experience from before the 20th century that I felt leaving out some mention was a mistake.
This flaw is however quite made up for by the charm and characterizations in this novel. Even non-Ricardians will enjoy this science/historical fiction novel with a healthy dose of thriller and mystery. Oh, and it's a wonderful love story as well.
This Time is available in "Perfect Paperback" and was published by Collected Stories/Bassett LLC, ISBN 978-0982449301. It is not yet available in any format accessible to the print impaired. Read interview and excerpt at Historical Novel Review, [...]
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Richard III for the 21st century, October 10, 2009
This review is from: This Time (Perfect Paperback)
I used to read a lot of fiction about Richard III, his times, and Richard as a man of his times. I stopped reading them because I found, after a while, that they tended to tread the same old ground, over and over again. This got boring. And that was the way things stayed until I discovered Joan Szechtman's "This Time", a tale about Richard, transported to 21st century Portland, Oregon, just before he was supposedly killed at Bosworth. I discovered the book quite accidentally, by being pointed to Ms. Szechtman's website, where she had posted an excerpt. This excerpt was enough to hook me, once again, so I bought the book. I was a little hesitant to read it at first, fearing the rest of it might disappoint me, but everything else was as good, if not better than, the excerpt. There are several reasons for this. Richard comes across as funny, and quite humanly believable in his attempts to adjust to the 21st century. He masters some things, such as technology, quite easily, and this, from what I've read in other contexts, is very believable. He also struggles with other things which would have been alien to most people living in 15th century England; he even admits to being brought up with prejudices(in fact, from what I've read of him and the period, he actually seems to have had very few biases in his thinking, though he probably thought like a person of his times). Ms. Szechtman has obviously done a great deal of research on Richard and his times, and has very successfully pulled all her research together in her book, in a way that is not obvious to the reader. Richard comes across as very believable in his truggles to adjust to 500 years worth of changes in a great many areas, yet manages to succeed in his endeavors. If there is one flaw in the book, it's perhaps, that it's just a little too easy for him to do this. Yet overall, so much of his adjustment is so believable that this flaw can easily be overlooked. I found the book quite enjoyable, and for me, that is rare. I enjoyed it so much, i fact, that I passed it on to a writer friend, who said she wanted to read it! I can think of no higher recommendation, especially for a first-time writer, and I look forward to Ms. Szechtman's sequels.
Anne Gilbert
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting mix of time travel and history, December 21, 2009
This review is from: This Time (Perfect Paperback)
This novel begins with an interesting premise--the use of a time travel device to bring back Richard III just as he is about to be killed by Stanley's men on Bosworth field. There is the inevitable cultural clash between a 15th-century man and the 21st-century environment to which he must acclimatize himself. Add to that his need to create meaningful relationships to continue to live--historically speaking, by the time he fought at Bosworth, he had lost his wife and son, which might have affected his ability to make the right decisions. This is the first book of a trilogy--I look forward to reading the rest.
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