Just One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor

The romance subplot is decidedly a subplot, but it’s nicely developed as these things go. Now, I admit that I was reading this before bed (or before a nap attack), but I shouldn’t have to be going, “Why is she so worried about this rando dude? Ooooooooh, because he’s not actually a rando!” If there is a list of the cast of characters, reading on a Kindle makes flipping back and forth to see who fits in where kind of hard, but a dramatis personae would have been nice. Max’s love interest is called one thing for a while, then another thing, then it kinda flips back and forth. There are a lot of characters to keep straight. It’s not clear to me, yet, how the mechanics of “history simply won’t let you fuck it up” works, but I’m hopeful that’ll be explored more in subsequent books. She’s made sure to differentiate her time-travelling historians from Willis’, and there’s enough structure given that the hand-wavey, “look, it works, don’t worry about it,” doesn’t feel like a cheat. Mary’s work to make sure that observer interference doesn’t mess up, you know, history? Taylor is pretty good at that part. There are a bunch of moving parts here that need setting up – how does the time travel tech work? How does the team at St. Mary’s, a institution that “investigates major historical events in contemporary time.” After training, she gets sent to the trenches of WWI France, and other places and times, before things go to hell. This is the story of Madeline Maxwell, a historian who is recruited by the secretive St.

Just One Damned Thing is the first book, and by necessity is setting up the rest of the series. This is a series of nine full length books, and a whole BUNCH of novellas. MirandaB mentioned that she was reading this book in May’s Whatcha Reading post, and being a big fan of Connie Willis’ time traveling historians books, I had to give this a try. Genre: Time Travel, Science Fiction/Fantasy

Just One Damned Thing After Another by Jodi Taylor