Customer Reviews

Out Of Time

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Emma, a 50 year-old university librarian, has led a fairly normal existence until the day she stumbles upon a strange box in her basement. Her real name, Merle Acalia, is written across the yellowed cardboard. Inside she finds a book of charms and spells and old letters, all left to her by Eleanor, the mother who abandoned her when she was very young. To her distress Emma becomes involved in a world of dimensions she had never imagined, a frightening world where curses take on form and must be hunted through time and destroyed lest they cause terrible suffering for those who live in the here-and-now. With reluctance Emma takes up the mantel of hunter-witch. Out of Time has a brilliant plot and intricate, believable characters. There is a proper ending, but with one part of the plot left unresolved, leaving it obvious that there is a sequel. I searched Amazon.com to discover the title - Behind Time. I can't wait to read it!

Lynn Abbey has always had the happy knack of writing what I wanted to read at the time I needed it. (I'm excluding her franchise work here.) This book is no exception.

The main characters in fantasy works are often very young. The theme is often coming of age. This is a fantasy for the sandwich generation, the one caught between the demands of children and aging parents. The story opens with the heroine essentially an orphan. Her father, who raised her after her mother's death, has died. Romantic relationships have failed her and all she retains of her last marriage is an attachment to her step children. However, she finds herself reluctantly playing maternal figure to some troubled college kids while her mother reappears.

It turns out her life is a great deal more complicated than she expected. There are going to be great demands placed on her but she is going to have great personal resources to meet these demands.

Watching the heroine discovering who she is and essentially coming into her power is a positive experience. I found myself cheering her on as she copes with the unexpected burdens she finds laid on her, both magical and mundane. Of the three faces of the goddess-- virgin, matron, hag, this is the one that is shown the least and I'm very happy to have Ms. Abbey fill this lack.

Kept me interested throughout. Unusual concept of time travel which seems to work well with the story. I also liked having a 50 something heroine for a change instead of a sweet young thing!

Others have gone over the plot. I just wanted to say that the prose style here is the best I have seen in years. Abbey has painted in the background of her word picture. There are authors who just barely show you the surrounding of a character; the forground is all that counts to them. Abbey has filled in the sky, the trees and all the petty personal problems that show up in day to day life. Abbey has made a credible entry in the "dull person has an insanely dangerous adventure and survives" category of books. I literally bought the book at 11am on Sunday and read it until 1am Monday.

Lynn Abbey makes a departure from her usual style to write a very comfortable fantasy that is based in the current time. Her characters are believable and Emma, the primary focus of this novel, is quite real in her actions and thoughts.

Time travel isn't really the topic, in spite of the title. This fantasy is more about one woman's wyrd, her ignorance of it until later in life, and how learning of that wyrd impacts her and some people near her. She deals with strange teenagers who are apparently afflicted with a curse (maybe more than one), a life that seems to be going in very odd directions and, right at the end, the reappearance of her mother. Interestingly enough, her mother should have been in her seventies but appeared to be much, much younger. That conundrum is wrapped up very tightly with the teenagers' curse and her role in trying to lift the curse.

The book ends abruptly and quite obviously paves the way for a sequel. This is a very good read!

This story became more interesting as the plot shifted from the mundane life of a middle-aged woman to a supernatural connection linking contemporary characters and events to historical characters and events.

Sadly, when the story ran its course, there were no tidy or clever conclusions to explain much of the mystery. The initial subplot is, roughly, resolved but there are too few "whys" and "hows" to satisfy this reader's imagination.

At the end, new plots are introduced while the roles (if not the natures) of some important characters remain unexplained. There are simply more questions raised by the final chapter than are answered -- and not in an intriguing way, but rather in a "stay tuned for next week's episode" way.

Overall, this book introduces an imaginative idea for a story but it fails to support it with creative details. The ending sets up more questions than it resolves, presumably to entice the reader to buy a sequel, which might be titled: "The Eternal Adventures of Em in the Wastelands."

Having wrapped up the '90's with such indefensible misfires as Siege of Shadows and Jerlayne, it seemed as if the only thing that was "out of time" where Lynn Abbey was concerned was her career. But lo and behold, Abbey's first novel of the new century (depending on how you count) is one of the nicest and most unexpected surprises I've come across. It reads almost as if Abbey herself is a new person. Her prose--heretofore pretentious, obtuse, dreary, not unlike wading through four feet of Mississippi river mud while carrying a knapsack full of bowling balls--is in this book clean, brisk, and accessible. Characterizations are warm, sympathetic, very real. And though it might seem a disservice to Abbey to suggest that after 20-odd years of trying she's finally gotten it right, it might be more diplomatic to suggest that maybe she's finally found the right type of story to let her talents bloom. In the past, with some exceptions, Abbey has directed her creative attentions towards high mythic fantasy--in most cases with stupefyingly disastrous results. Out of Time, on the other hand, is a contemporary fantasy reminiscent of 1982's The Guardians, and it's in a modern day setting that Abbey seems to feel most at home (the bizarreness of Jerlayne notwithstanding). So it's no surprise that this is Abbey's best book since The Guardians, and I welcome her return to fables set in the here-and-now. Granted, it's not exactly filled to the brim with lightning-paced action and edge of your seat suspense. It's a subdued, nuanced little tale, not hurriedly paced but not boring either. It all begins when 50-year-old Emma Merrigan, who works at a university library in Michigan and lives an otherwise drearily ordinary life with her two cats, discovers a frightened and apparently battered young girl sleeping deep within the labyrinthine library stacks. Jennifer Hodden's situation seems all too typical; in denial about an abusive boyfriend and indecisive about what to do with herself. Yet Jennifer's arrival seems to have triggered a return of the "night terrors," strange and inexplicable recurring nightmares that occasionally haunted Emma's childhood following the equally inexplicable disappearance of Emma's mother. As Emma gets more and more caught up in the turmoil of Jennifer and her boyfriend Bran's odd dilemma, she discovers and old box in her house that she's never seen before, though it has clearly been bequeathed her by her long lost and enigmatic mother. An examination of the box reveals that Emma's mom was either certifiably nuts or dealt in honest-to-goodness witchcraft, with a predisposition for curses and how to stop them. Soon Emma finds herself drawn into the realm of her night terrors more and more frequently, and an increasing series of frightening encounters leads her to the conclusion that what must be plaguing Jennifer and Bran is an actual curse, though where it originated and how to erase it are other problems entirely. An interesting touch of Abbey's is her concept of curses: malevolent sources of power brought about by tragic events, that can then become "persistent," travelling through time affecting new hosts like a virus or parasite, unless someone with the paranormal abilities of Emma's mother (or now, as it seems, Emma herself) can trace the curse to its temporal root and squash it before it has a chance to be freed. Nice. Other aspects of Out of Time are more mundane. Anyone who's even a slight veteran of stories of magic and what-have-you will easily predict that the mere mention of a long-lost, mysterious parent means that the story's finale will see that parent pop back up in our herione's life to help her solve the problem. (And so I don't feel guilty of a spoiler by revealing it here.) But though Abbey cannot avoid resorting to the obvious in that instance, her story thankfully isn't robbed of its intrigue because of it. When Emma finally does root out the source of the curse, it's both compelling and sad in classic tragic tradition. But Abbey's biggest coup here is the character of Emma herself, the most real heroine Abbey has ever created, and one whom it is easy to surmise may be something of an alter-ego. Even the most intricately conceived plot and sumptuous prose cannot save a story if you don't have a protagonist who transcends the status of "character on a page" to become a real person the readers feel they truly know at the end. Emma is Abbey's triumph (particularly compared to such gratingly loathsome characters as Jerlayne or Berika of The Wooden Sword), and I hope to see this kind of heart in future Abbey stories now that she's getting this good at it. Out of Time is no fantasy masterpiece, and it would be unrealistic to expect Abbey to produce one all at once after a decade's worth of clunkers. The tale loses steam as it wraps up, with all loose ends sort of falling together too neatly, culminating in an ending that is much too abrupt even while managing to leave room open for a sequel should sales justify one. Yet it is a good book to curl up with on a wintry night with a fire blazing and your cat on your lap. And it bodes well that this decade might be considerably less accursed than the last one was, where Lynn Abbey's novels are concerned.

Emma Merrigan is a 50 year old woman, living a rather dull life. But bumping into an abused teenager, and inviting her to stay with her draws her into a strange world, where curses exist, and time travel (sort off) is possible. This book is not really a time travel novel (as I thought when I bought it), it's more of a fantasy book. But I never read any other book like it. Lynn Abbey, the author, creates a believable fantasy world. It reminded me a bit of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere - a fantasy world superimposed on our modern reality. I really loved the book - and am eagerly looking for a sequel.

This book has a wonderful premise of how and what curses are and the people who fight them. It also has a three musketeer type man who "recues" the heroine.

I read through this book because I wanted to see how it ended, but I was never strongly drawn in or intrigued by it.

The characters are not particularly sympathetic or well fleshed out and they feel more like puppets on the authors stage.

The plot, as well, seems to me a rather tedious patchwork rather then a consistent unfolding drama.

There are no surprises, no aha!s, just a steady curious but indifferent read.