Remember the scientific news from last summer, about particles moving faster than the speed of light? Since I couldn't understand the physics, it meant only one thing to me: time travel!!What if you could go back in time to 1958? Would you alter the one event in US history--the assassination of Jack Kennedy--that could change so much more? Was our experience different in Vietnam because Lyndon Johnson was president? Perhaps Martin Luther King Jr. wouldn't have been assassinated. Or Bobby Kennedy...
In Stephen King's new book, 11/22/63, Jake Epping has a chance to find out. His friend Al is dying, and Al confesses that his diner's storage room contains a portal to September 9, 1958. Jake takes a tentative trip back in time, then accepts Al's mission: to ascertain that Oswald acted alone and to thwart Oswald's attempt on Kennedy's life. As a reader, you step back in time with Jake, a time when women always wore dresses, men wore hats, everyone smoked cigarettes, cars had fins, and there was no air conditioning, or cell phones, or internet.
Stephen King tells a good story and keeps it moving, full of period details, likeable characters, and plot twists. For avid King readers, there are cameo appearances by characters from his other books. And at 850 pages, the book serves as its own portal, pulling you in and giving you time to experience the 60's. Enjoy the trip!
2 comments:
I enjoy King, but missed the cameo appearances of other characters - who were they?
Derry, Maine is the setting for King's novel It, a book that also deals with the passage of time. Two of the children in It, Beverly Marsh and Richie Tozier, appear in 11/22/63--they're the two learning to dance the lindy-hop.
King also has several references in 11/22/63 to a 1958 Plymouth Fury. Could this by Christine?
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