THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TIME TRAVEL.

 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TIME TRAVEL by KATE MASCARENHAS.

- 1967 -

Four female scientists invent a time travel machine. But then one of them suffers a breakdown and puts the whole project in peril...

- 2017 -

Ruby knows her Granny Bee was the scientist who went mad, but they never talk about it. Until they receive a message from the future, warning of an elderly woman's violent death...

- 2018 -

Odette found the dead women at work – shot in the head, door bolted from the inside. Now she can't get her out of her mind. Who was she? And why is everyone determined to cover up her murder?

- Back cover Blurb

The laboratory, in Cumbria, was home to four young scientists.

- First Sentence; March-December 1967: Barbara

As soon as she stepped from a time machine, at the age of twenty-one, she felt like a ghost - what other name could be applied to a woman who walked among people born centuries after herself? To them, she should be dead.

- Memorable Moment; Page 173

SOURCE ... A Oxford Centre Reading Group read.

READ FOR A CHALLENGE? ... No.

MY THOUGHTS ... A reading group read, I admit I would never have chosen to read this as the concept of time travel is about as alien to me as it gets ... and especially so the kind of time travel novels in which ...

Her older self laughed and crushed her in a hug (Pg 9)

Its not that I lack imagination, its not that I'm unable to suspend disbelief. I can even accept characters travelling to Ancient Egypt/some space station of the future. I can even understand how their actions might have ramifications for their 'future' selves. Its just try as I might I cannot, cannot get my head around a character meeting his/her own self; let alone .... AGGGGHHHH! A character's 'current' self, 'younger' self and 'older' self all being in the same place at the same time. 

With lots of layers to it - events that because of the non-linear format in which it is written we are often only fully privy to elsewhere in the narrative - I struggled in that I didn't feel I had a solid grip on what was happening, what had happened or what was about to happen. Arguably little to do with the author's skills (or lack thereof?) and everything to do with me but either way the result was the same ... for much of the book I was thoroughly confused. 

A hybrid of what is essentially Sci-fi and a murder mystery); I'm just not convinced that this multi-genre approach will satisfy die-hard fans of either genre. 

Still, a brave attempt at a book that not so much questioned the science of time travel as came at it from a very human and what I felt was an original perspective, that of the psychological effect(s) of time travel.