I picked up The Show, the sequel to The Mine, immediately after I finished reading The Mine.

The concepts applied were pretty much the same as in The Mine.

In The Show, the author made a nice transition from the ending of The Mine, when we were told that Grace followed Joel “back to the future” but we were never witness to how it came about.

In The Show, the first chapters told Grace’s point of view, and it was quite entertaining.

Grace and Joel got married, had children, and it would have seemed that they lived happily ever after. Then something strange happened to Grace when they were out for a date at the Palladium Theater. Just like Joel was relocated to 1941 in the old mine, Grace was bumped to 1918. Like Joel found his grandmother as a young girl, Grace found her parents as teenagers and observed them actually meeting.

Most of the rest of the story was, to me, quite boring. The author sure likes his romance. His characters seem to do strange things when it comes to “love.” Joel  in The Mine, and Grace in The Show, both got engaged to locals in the time they were visiting. Why would a person who is trapped and works on getting out of there get engaged? Why did neither tell their partner the truth about who they were, when they eventually had to anyway, just much harder?

If I don’t think of these books as time travel books but rather romances, everything falls in place. The women are all exceedingly beautiful. The men smart, strong, courageous and dashing. Whenever the men kiss, they “kiss tenderly.” The characters always profess their love after just a few weeks of knowing the other.

The stuff of romance.

There is nothing science fiction about Heldt’s time travel books. They are romances with time-plot-twist aspects, and those twists do work.

They got me to read the books and finish them.

Rating: **