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.
This is a series of nine full length books, and a whole BUNCH of novellas. Just One Damned Thing is the first book, and by necessity is setting up the rest of the series.
This is the story of Madeline Maxwell, a historian who is recruited by the secretive 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.
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 work to make sure that observer interference doesn’t mess up, you know, history? Taylor is pretty good at that part. 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. 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.
There are a lot of characters to keep straight. Too many, if we’re being honest. Max’s love interest is called one thing for a while, then another thing, then it kinda flips back and forth. 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.
The romance subplot is decidedly a subplot, but it’s nicely developed as these things go. It’s not my favorite “I hate you, I hate you, I can’t stop thinking about your hair” (tm Sarah) progression, but it is “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about your hair since you walked in the door and my heart went BOOM” with some, “Wait, you what now? I thought you didn’t like me!” And there’s consummation of relationship by way of car accident, and that was WELL done.
I’m a bit surprised that St. Mary’s doesn’t have an anti-fraternization policy, but then again, it’s so secret-heavy that you can’t trust someone from the outside with the fact that TIME TRAVEL IS A THING YO. And the team at St. Mary’s doesn’t get out much, so the only options for a potential partner is a co-worker, and AND the trips back in time are pretty fraught, so everyone needs a good “celebrate the fact that we’re still alive!” fuck every once in a while. So, I guess a strict anti-fraternization policy is just not feasible. I processed all of that right here, right in front of you.
The title is a reference to a misquote from historian Arnold J. Toynbee. The misquote is that “History is just one damned thing after another” but the actual thing he said was:
And yet an historian who thus publicly declared his allegiance to the dogma that History is just ‘one damned thing after another’ had, in calling his book A History of Europe, committed himself, almost in the same breath, to a predetermined pattern in which the history of one indistinguishable ‘continent’ was equated with the whole history of Mankind. . .
Here is a blog post exploring the mutations the phrase has endured over the past century – it’s pretty interesting! Basically it’s a beef with another historian on their respective approaches to how history even works and how best to study it. You used to have to work to find academics snarking at each other and any fight took its sweet ass time (you had to wait until the next academic journal came out); now we just take to Twitter.
However, the title is good hint as to what the book is like. It’s a RAPID pace, and everything happens so much, one right after another, boom, boom, boom. I wanted some breathing room, but not for me, I wanted the characters to have a break! I mean, that is the point, that things just roll downhill and there’s no stopping point until events have worked themselves to a plateau.
If you’re a fan of Connie Willis, I would suggest you give this series a try. It doesn’t take itself quite so seriously, and Max as a heroine and audience surrogate is a lot of fun. It’s potentially a commitment, given that there are 9 books and a bunch of novellas, but I’m looking forward to making a dent in my TBR pile to read the next book.
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I LOVE this series! I’ve read all the books and am now starting on the audios. I will say, tho, that they can be a bit hard on the system at times. The rapid pace you mentioned never lets up, and the characters and the reader are put thru the wringer. And, as fascinating as the historical jaunts are, they can also be pretty emotionally brutal. I mean, you know bad things happened to people in the past, and Taylor doesn’t pull her punches. Luckily, the humor and humanity of the St. Mary’s team keeps things from being overly grim.
I was mentioned in an SB post. Wow! And sort of…eek!
Anyway, I’m glad RHG likes the books. I’m working on the second one, Symphony of Echoes and it’s fun too. I agree that there are a lot of characters, and some of the secondary ones are interchangeable (Guthrie/Peterson/etc).
I hardly ever binge-read, so any book in a series I’m following will turn up every 8th or 9th book or so in my reading list. It makes for a break.
I love this series too and am working my way through them. There is one of those book “0.5” novellas to kick it off, and I have to admit to being underwhelmed by that one. Just read it for the background and don’t let it put you off. The rest have been great so far. Just love the characters and the quirky humour, and the other novellas after the first have been fun too.
I couldn’t make myself finish this one. I really liked the premise but there were too many creepy men and I didn’t like that there wasn’t an overarching plot. Or at least, there was so much going on it was hard to tell what was important.
She also uses “If only I had known then what I know now” a LOT. I actually started noticing her doing it in The Nothing Girl, too, which is disappointing because I really liked that book but that line drives me up the wall! I think an author gets to use it once a book, maybe. She uses it over and over!
I also thought the hero was a dick and didn’t do enough groveling to be forgiven so soon. And the passage of time wasn’t very clear – the training must take a certain amount of time because suddenly the trainees aren’t strangers anymore, but it’s not clear how much time has passed. Basically, I kept getting thrown out of the story and lost interest. I wanted it to be more madcap and silly, like Murder with Peacocks with time travel, but it ended up annoying me.
The whole time I was reading this book I was like, “Wait, who just died? Who is this person? Why do I care that they’re dead?” It was just too much for me (I also read it before bed a lot so I was maybe just sleepy). Plus, I wanted more history and less rapey coworker/tea drinking drama. I need to donate my copy of this book someplace so that it can find a good home.
I giggled my way through this review. I love your writing.
I love the series. But I also had some trouble in the beginning with keeping track of characters. I thought it was because I was listening to it on audio. But apparantly that is not it. I liked the romance at first, but I have now finished the third volume and am getting annoyed with the relationship aspect of the story. I love for a relationship to have “normal” phases, where the couple builds mutual trust and memories. So that it feels like a real relationship to me. Here there is only drama, and then some more drama. But maybe that will improve in the next one. I hope. Because I will continue reading the books. I just have to pace myself a little, because of the emotional impact they have on me. The author certainly is of the “what is the worst possible thing that could happen now?” school.
I started reading this series about two months ago and absolutely love it–I’ve requested the complete set as a birthday or Christmas present. I do find the characters very hard to keep track of. In the print books there is a list of characters which I frequently had to refer back to.
Thanks so much for the recommendation – am loving this series (much more than Connie Willis, sorry :-() The narrator of the audio books is wonderful.