Review: Time Out!: An Adventure in Time Travel

Time Out!: An Adventure in Time Travel by Kevin Creager
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Neither as bad as I had feared nor as good as I had hoped, but in the end mediocre.

There's a sub-subgenre of time travel that's about a young man going back to his earlier life to correct his mistakes, specifically to take his older self's knowledge and confidence into his earlier romantic failures (or failures to initiate romance), and this book is in that camp. Most of us, I think, have had the "if I'd known then what I know now" thoughts; it's not a highly original premise, but it's relatable. This version, at least, doesn't set out to change the timeline, and takes the protagonist to a different (later) point in his crush's life, when she's at college and his younger self is at college somewhere else. He also ends up doing something a bit more significant with the time travel than just finding love, which is good.

I do go with some trepidation into a plot that is about a young man who's a bit of a loser setting out to find love, because he's inevitably going to do so even though he realistically shouldn't. While this particular hero does show some degree of development as a person and is more or less and on the whole a decent guy, I still didn't think he rated quite so much attention from two attractive women.

What really dragged the book's rating down, though, was the ultimate lack of explanation of the time travel and who or what was behind it all. Even the supposed communications from the protagonist to himself ended up as sourceless and unexplained (the author hung a lampshade on it, but that doesn't excuse it). In the end, the time travel is a plot device which probably didn't even need to be there; I can imagine a version of this book that had essentially the same main plot, or the most important parts of it, at least, without requiring time travel at all.

I had a pre-release version from Netgalley for review, which needed quite a bit of work from a good copy editor; I hope it gets that work before publication.

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