Very good time travel story without a time machine and paradoxes accumuluate as a father attempts to save his daughter who has went back in time to die in the 1918 flu epidemic

It's been about 16 years since I read this book, and I still remember it. Not perfectly, but certain elements very very deeply. ( )

Both lovely and suspenseful. Appealing to fans of both SF and of good popular fiction. The time-travel element was well-explored, rather than just a gimmick, but it wasn't laden with pseudo-science. The characters are interesting and the plot moves along at a good pace. The only problem is that it's too short - not concise in a good way, but it seems, about 2/3 through, as if the author got tired and stopped developing the new ideas and situations, and didn't do any more with the old. Lots of loose ends - not that I wish they'd been tied up pretty, but it seems like the author neither had the vision and ran out of time and energy to figure out where things might have gone.

Sorry the negative comments took up most of the previous paragraph. I really did like the book a lot and will definitely look into the author's other work. ( )

very good, time travel. An interesting new take. ( )

As children in Euclid Heights, Illinois, Josh and Flo were brought together when a local thug, the sheriff's son, killed Flo's brother and caused Josh's brother profound mental damage. Now they're married, still in Euclid Heights, and with a daughter of their own; Josh is an unsuccessful artist while Flo, a moderately pediatrician, keeps the family's economic boat afloat.

One day Josh, out cycling, has an encounter with time travel: a vicious dog that was chasing him suddenly disappears and is soon after re-encountered, seemingly having been slipped a few minutes into the future. A while later, Josh himself experiences minor time travel. He attributes these dislocations of the timeline to the curious layout of Euclid Heights; as well as the ordinary grid of streets, the town has so-called perp walks cutting across, and it's while traveling along these perp walks that temporal hiccups seem to occur. And not necessarily just hiccups: into the town comes an adolescent girl, Constance, who seems to have inadvertently made the trip to the present from the early 19th century. Since Josh is now notorious throughout town for his claims about time travel, it's inevitable these two will drift together -- not in any romantic sense, but simply in that Josh feels a solution to Constance's problem will give him some kind of answer to his own.

And in a way that's what happens; she returns to her own time, where she carves out a short and not very happy existence for herself. However, Josh's daughter Penny is likewise sucked back into the past; he succeeds in following her but, on his return to the present he discovers that much has changed: now he isn't married to Flo but instead to a woman called Lee, and they live in happy poverty as tenants of Josh's brother, who in this timeline was not brain-damaged by the bully. After a certain amount of mental conniption, Josh seems to accept this new order.

I loved all but the last few pages of this book. The writing is often very lovely. Not only are the characters fully three-dimensional, so are the relationships between them; particularly impressive was the depiction of the relationship between Josh and Flo, which he thinks is a perfectly happy and healthy one all the while we, the readers, can see this is far from the case -- his fairly ready acclimatization to marriage to a different woman is not as implausible as the bald data might make it seem. Also pleasing is that Josh is by no means the excellent fellow he believes himself to be; one of the contributory reasons for his poor relationship with Flo is that he actually is a bit of a wastrel, a would-be artist who would rather keep on tinkering than face the fact that his talent is slight and he should think about doing something more productive.

So what of those last few pages? Well, it's as if the book had a final chapter that was accidentally left out. We're told that even in this world Josh's brother has some kind of recurring problem, but never do we find out what that problem is. When Penny returns from the past to find herself living in a different Now from the one she left, there's a clumsy attempt to tie everything off in a sentence or two and then the book suddenly ends. Will Penny accept the new status quo and settle down with her father and Lee, or will she try to get back to her original family in the parallel timeline? Who knows? -- any explanation is in that hypothetical missing chapter. When I got to the book's final page, my jaw dropped; I went back a few pages and reread them, in case I'd been stupid and missed something; but seemingly not. Very strange -- especially since all the rest of the book is so very, very good.
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