Craig Pelling is a 46-year-old man in England in 2016. He lives in alcohol-soft middle-age, to use a Pink Floyd phrase. He is pudgy, balding, out of shape, lazy and overall a fairly unlikable character. He has lived for more than 20 years in a love-less marriage, and his career, by his own standards, has been lackluster. When an old high school classmate and bully of his becomes his new boss, his whole world comes crashing down.
His parents are moving out of their house into a retirement home and ask him to come home and clean out his childhood room. When he turns on the computer, something surreal happens and he is transported back into this 16-year-old body. He gets to spend a weekend as his teenage self, with his middle-aged man’s experiences and knowledge of his future. He is determined to set some things right. Can he fix his life, and the lives of those around him? He definitely tries.
The first half of the book is describing Craig’s failures and current situation in 2016. It’s kind of slow and boring, being the fairly unlikeable character that he is. At about the mid-point he performs the time travel, and things get much more interesting. The pace picks up.
But the ending is terrible. Readers want to see the hero win, they want an upbeat story. The ending is deflating and depressing, and it becomes obvious that the writer simply set us up to read the sequel.
In addition to lack of editing regarding the plot, and the marketing of the book, it also has a good number of grammatical errors that somewhat distracted me. I was going rate this book two out of four stars, but the horrible ending just depressed me and I am downgrading it to 1.5 stars.
But that’s apparently not going to stop me from buying Beyond Broadhall, the sequel. I want to know what happens to Craig next.
Oh well, you didn’t like it. I do find there’s a very poor correlation between how much I enjoy a novel and how much other people enjoy it — indeed I’ve drawn a graph in excel and there’s scarcely any discernable correlation between my ratings and average goodread ratings.
I kinda liked the ending, although around 3-4 years since I’ve read it now. I never got the impression that he originally intended to write a sequel either.
Incidentally, I tried reading “The Accidental Time Machine – by Joe Haldeman” for which you gave 4 stars. I gave up on it shortly after the main character travelled 177 years into the future. That was just after the main character had one of the most meaningless excruciating boring conversations imaginable with one of the natives of that time.
It looks like our tastes in novels are poles apart!
Chuckle. I don’t remember that part about “Accidental.” It’s been a while. I think I remember it being a well-crafted story.
My ratings don’t always mean I like or don’t like it. For instance, I kept turning the pages, I enjoyed the writer’s style. But in the end, I step back, compare it to all other readings and then I give it a fair (subjective) rating. And yes, I often do not align with others. But that’s part of the beauty.
I also strongly despised the book. I found parts of it borderline pedophilic and hate the “best selling” subtitle. This was no bestseller
Not sure how anyone writes about their character’s first sexual encounter at school in the setting of a novel like this and avoids mentioning the act?