|
Loading... Out of Time (edition 2000)by Lynn Abbey
 reading_fox | Jun 26, 2012 | 
Time travelling urban fantasy with an unusual heroine. Works much better than I'd have expected - perhaps helped by the fact that the time travelling is actually quite a small part of the story. Emma is a 50 yr ol university Library director - hence not the usual suspect for having out of body experiences. All through her childhood she'd put hese down to dreams and 'Night Terrors' and eventually grown out of them. However when she finds a beaten up girl amoungst the library stacks she's comassionate enough to help even when said girl isn't that communicative and doesn't want to believe the worst about her boyfriend. He has 'demons' apparently and she's worried she caught them herself. Emma's dreams come on again that night, but replete with 50 years of self confidence she banishes them through an image of fire. Conversations and research (with library colleagues who can't replicate her dreaming), and a strange trunk that she doesn't remember packing, lead her to 11th century England where William the Conqueror's men have been wrapped up in an ancient curse that lasts through time to the present. It just about hangs together, relies greatly on the resilience of time and an absolute present.... neither of which are fully supported, but provideding little is changed in the past then it's just about belivable enough. The older women's perspective on internal politcs etc works very well, as does the loving desriptsion of the town. Emma is completely believable as a born and bred resident of small town USA. The bit parts of other characters are slightly less so. Pacing is somewhat slow, and this is even without much explanation as Emma fumbles her way to an approximate understanding of how things work in the 'other plane'. I wasn't impressed with the frequent references to an 'engineering gene' as a requirement to fignure out the how's that everyone else just accepts - it's a useful concept but slightly overdone here, but probably better than the usual mysticism. Readable, different and in place enjoyable it is the best work I've read from Abbey, but still fails that totally absorbing spark that other writers can manage. (  ) reading_fox | Jun 26, 2012 | Very good cliffhanger ending, 2007 (  ) amazon59 | Oct 3, 2009 | Em is a fifty-year-old university librarian with a comfortable, if boring, life. After two divorces, she lives alone with her cats and occupies herself with work. One day she finds an abused girl in the library, and offers her a place to stay for the night. This lands Em in the midst of a supernatural plot. She also discovers magical powers passed down to her from a mysterious mother she never knew. It sounds like an interesting premise, unfortunately the writing is just plain clunky. For example: the first chapter is straight exposition, and can be skimmed or skipped entirely, which is downright annoying. Large chunks of the plot tend to drag, and when Em's powers are finally revealed they are extremely underwhelming. Basically, she has the power to wander around in a barren landscape before popping up (as an invisible spectator) in another time and place. She witnesses a few paragraphs worth of action, which is meant to explain away the book's antagonist. In the end, it was fairly boring. (  ) catfantastic | Jul 29, 2009 | Sort of occult-ish fantasy, like the sequel I've already read. For some reason left me not particularly wanting to read any more in the series, though I found it compelling enough at first. The first few pages, tohugh, were a textbook example of what an infodump is and why it shouldn't be done: a spew of information about her job, marriages, stepkids, most of which never came up again. As if the author wrote a bunch of notes about her character and added them to the story so she wouldn't forget. In the sequal, much of the same information showed up, but gradually, as needed, and much more interestingly, a gradual fleshing out of the character.There was definitely something about the ending I disliked. The way it stopped. The way Eleanor was such an idiot. (  )1  krisiti | Jul 1, 2009 | I had trouble connecting with a 50 year old heroine who was a librarian and way too much like me...but it was a different twist on the time travel theme. I thought the plot could have hung together a bit better though. ( ) sprowett | Jul 19, 2008 | An interesting story involving a librarian who finds out that she can resove curses and travel in time, after she finds a girl beaten up in the library. ( ) wyvernfriend | Oct 21, 2005 | |
 Google Books — Loading...RatingAverage: (3.18)
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
2
Emma is a 50 yr ol university Library director - hence not the usual suspect for having out of body experiences. All through her childhood she'd put hese down to dreams and 'Night Terrors' and eventually grown out of them. However when she finds a beaten up girl amoungst the library stacks she's comassionate enough to help even when said girl isn't that communicative and doesn't want to believe the worst about her boyfriend. He has 'demons' apparently and she's worried she caught them herself. Emma's dreams come on again that night, but replete with 50 years of self confidence she banishes them through an image of fire. Conversations and research (with library colleagues who can't replicate her dreaming), and a strange trunk that she doesn't remember packing, lead her to 11th century England where William the Conqueror's men have been wrapped up in an ancient curse that lasts through time to the present.
It just about hangs together, relies greatly on the resilience of time and an absolute present.... neither of which are fully supported, but provideding little is changed in the past then it's just about belivable enough. The older women's perspective on internal politcs etc works very well, as does the loving desriptsion of the town. Emma is completely believable as a born and bred resident of small town USA. The bit parts of other characters are slightly less so.
Pacing is somewhat slow, and this is even without much explanation as Emma fumbles her way to an approximate understanding of how things work in the 'other plane'. I wasn't impressed with the frequent references to an 'engineering gene' as a requirement to fignure out the how's that everyone else just accepts - it's a useful concept but slightly overdone here, but probably better than the usual mysticism.
Readable, different and in place enjoyable it is the best work I've read from Abbey, but still fails that totally absorbing spark that other writers can manage. (