Invercargill City Libraries

Not your usual Stephen King novel

Posted by Angela on 25 January 2012 | 0 Comments

Tags: Fiction, Reviews, Angelas reviews

11.22.63 Stephen King

If you had the opportunity to go back in time and change one single act in history, would you?  Should you?  This is the dilemma faced by schoolteacher Jake Epping in 2011 when an acquaintance, Al, enlists his help to stop the assassination of JFK in 1963.  Al discovered a portal which takes him back to 1958.  He had planned to live in the past for five years until he was able to stop the Kennedy assassination, but illness forced him back to the present, and he now needs Jake’s help.  It is Al's belief that many of the ills of today's world stem from the untimely death of President Kennedy, and if Jake can succeed in preventing the assassination, the world would be a much better place.

After a couple of trial runs to test if his actions in the past can actually alter the present, Jake decides to give the mission a go and steps back in time, becoming George Amberson.  As George, Jake lives a double life: that of a small-town high school teacher and aspiring writer who falls in love with the new school librarian (Sadie), and a man on a mission who stalks the every move of an angry young man named Lee Harvey Oswald.  Jake wrestles with whether he should be trying to change history, and also wrestles with the past itself, which, he discovers, does not necessarily want to be changed.

This is not your usual Stephen King fare.  It is very much a historical/time travel novel, with no monsters (except of the human variety) in sight.  It is also a moving love story.  It is a long read, but in my opinion, well worth the effort.  The storyline is thought-provoking and there is enough action and suspense to pull you through.  King devotees will be happy to recognise a couple of familiar characters whom Jake encounters in Derry (see if you can spot them!).