A Shortcut in Time

Rating:
Summary: Finally! A worthy successor to Finney!
Review: I love time-travel novels, especially when they're character-centered, and free of the space-travel mumbo-jumbo you find in a lot of science fiction. Over the years, I've seen a lot of time-travel stories compared to the works of Jack Finney, and without question, they fell short, sometimes miserably.

So when I saw yet another blurb on the jacket mentioning Finney, I was skeptical, but as always, willing to investigate. I'm glad I did. In this novel, Mr. Dickinson writes about everyday life, filtered through a bit of the fantastic. It's less like Finney's _Time and Again_, and more like the short-story gems found in his collection _About Time_, with nods to material in _Three By Finney_ (stuff worth reading, if you haven't).

Sure, there are some plot holes (Richard Matheson is about the only time-travel writer I've read who scrupulously avoids them), but nothing to dampen your enjoyment of this unique little story. If you like gentle "Twilight Zone" types of tales and alternate histories (albeit on a much smaller scale here), you'll most likely appreciate what Dickinson has achieved in _A Shortcut in Time_.

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Summary: I Lost Myself In This Book
Review: I loved the Widows' Adventure, and was excited to see the author had a new book out. A Shortcut in Time explores entirely new ideas, and is a fascinating read. The last half of the book occupied my thoughts when I was away from it and enthralled me when I was reading it. I found myself trying to work out the potential twists and turns - but the author came up with ideas that surprised me yet made perfect sense. A true delight.

Rating:
Summary: Wow
Review: I never had heard of this book and being a fan of Jack Finney, Ken Grimwood, and R. Matheson, this little book was a find. Great character writing as well plot and theme. I could read it again right now.

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Summary: A (Slightly) Different Opinion
Review: I prefer a book whose action flows, where events and characters do not bevome so convoluted that the sheer enjoyment wears thin. In many places in this book, I found myself having to really ponder what was happening and to whom it was happening. I also was not particularly fond of any of the characters.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent read!
Review: I really enjoyed this book by Charles Dickinson. Time travel, being a well-explored topic of many writers over the years, gets a new wrinkle and then some. Less is more here. Dickinson's elegant style and structure moves the story along at a very satisfying pace. The tale comes to us in layers and waves - always moving forward and yet (time travel again here) multi-faceted and textured. Unlike many other tales of time-travel, most of the time we are in the present (wherever that happens to be at the moment) with the lead character and, as such, the narrative is easy to follow through the different twists and turns. Recommended!

Rating:
Summary: Great Read
Review: I really enjoyed this book. I thought the characters were well developed. I certainly did not guess the end to this book.
Athough, I might have liked more details describing how the Main character's life changed I enjoyed this Hitchock like ending.

I would recommennd this book. I have read many time travel stories and this was a good one.

Rating:
Summary: Strong start, weak finish
Review: Josh Winkler, a less than ordinary man, but a believable, like-able character, his wife, child and town are torn by a somewhat unbelievable episode of time travel. He travels 15 minutes into the past and disrupts his life forever. The tangle he creates is suspenseful and involves everyone he touches.

The novel starts out very strong, with good characterization and concept, but weakens with each passing page. At the end, the characters become a mere 2 dimensional shell of what they were at the beginning of the tale.

This is a fun and suspenseful story for the first 1/3 of the book and then becomes tedious and tiring. It feels as if the author just ran out of steam and inspiration at the end, threw up his hands and says, "I quit."

A shame.... the concept was good and it started off well......

Rating:
Summary: Short Review of A Shortcut in Time
Review: Not one of the best time travel yarns that I have read. Still, the concept of the book was original and the characters were rather well developed

Rating:
Summary: A shortcut in plot?
Review: The author definitely had some fun with the concept of time travel and created a fast-paced and entertaining story, which didn't get bogged down in concerns over the intracacies of time travel and its paradoxes or explanations as to how the the characters were able to skip so freely through time. However, I agree with many of the other reviewers that the ending was absolutely inexcusable. I've never encountered such a sudden and abrupt ending. I had to track down another copy of the book to ensure that I wasn't just missing pages. I can only assume that the author simply fell through a time hole himself and wasn't around the finish the book. The characters are left hanging without any resolution or explanation. While I appreciate that not every story has a happy ending, at a minimum, I expected an ending of some sort. Readers of this book will definitely feel cheated at the "conclusion".

Rating:
Summary: Awful.
Review: The only reason I read all the way to the (like others have said) really bad ending is to try to justify the money I spent on the book [...]. The book starts out on a bad note, with an unlikeable main character, and in the end, you still don't like him. He's quite willing to putter on his lazy butt while his wife is hard at work, and when his time travel nonsense starts to cost her business, he doesn't seem to care, and gets mad at her for not believing that he can time travel. Early in the book, he claims he wishes his brother had died in an accident as a child, but the book never explains why. Apparently it's just too much to love a brother with mental problems, as he's just left him be homeless.

When he does finally change time, we don't really know how, and we don't know what happened differently. We're just placed in a totally new situation. That's the boring part. How did everything change? You go through the whole thing of telling us the childhood story, then you change it "somehow," and don't tell us how it changed? What a waste.