Charles Dickinson (1) (1951–)

As children in Euclid Heights, Illinois, Josh and Flo were brought together when a local thug, the sheriff's son, killed Flo's brother and caused Josh's brother profound mental damage. Now they're married, still in Euclid Heights, and with a daughter of their own; Josh is an unsuccessful artist while Flo, a moderately pediatrician, keeps the family's economic boat afloat.

One day Josh, out cycling, has an encounter with time travel: a vicious dog that was chasing him suddenly disappears and show more is soon after re-encountered, seemingly having been slipped a few minutes into the future. A while later, Josh himself experiences minor time travel. He attributes these dislocations of the timeline to the curious layout of Euclid Heights; as well as the ordinary grid of streets, the town has so-called perp walks cutting across, and it's while traveling along these perp walks that temporal hiccups seem to occur. And not necessarily just hiccups: into the town comes an adolescent girl, Constance, who seems to have inadvertently made the trip to the present from the early 19th century. Since Josh is now notorious throughout town for his claims about time travel, it's inevitable these two will drift together -- not in any romantic sense, but simply in that Josh feels a solution to Constance's problem will give him some kind of answer to his own.

And in a way that's what happens; she returns to her own time, where she carves out a short and not very happy existence for herself. However, Josh's daughter Penny is likewise sucked back into the past; he succeeds in following her but, on his return to the present he discovers that much has changed: now he isn't married to Flo but instead to a woman called Lee, and they live in happy poverty as tenants of Josh's brother, who in this timeline was not brain-damaged by the bully. After a certain amount of mental conniption, Josh seems to accept this new order.

I loved all but the last few pages of this book. The writing is often very lovely. Not only are the characters fully three-dimensional, so are the relationships between them; particularly impressive was the depiction of the relationship between Josh and Flo, which he thinks is a perfectly happy and healthy one all the while we, the readers, can see this is far from the case -- his fairly ready acclimatization to marriage to a different woman is not as implausible as the bald data might make it seem. Also pleasing is that Josh is by no means the excellent fellow he believes himself to be; one of the contributory reasons for his poor relationship with Flo is that he actually is a bit of a wastrel, a would-be artist who would rather keep on tinkering than face the fact that his talent is slight and he should think about doing something more productive.

So what of those last few pages? Well, it's as if the book had a final chapter that was accidentally left out. We're told that even in this world Josh's brother has some kind of recurring problem, but never do we find out what that problem is. When Penny returns from the past to find herself living in a different Now from the one she left, there's a clumsy attempt to tie everything off in a sentence or two and then the book suddenly ends. Will Penny accept the new status quo and settle down with her father and Lee, or will she try to get back to her original family in the parallel timeline? Who knows? -- any explanation is in that hypothetical missing chapter. When I got to the book's final page, my jaw dropped; I went back a few pages and reread them, in case I'd been stupid and missed something; but seemingly not. Very strange -- especially since all the rest of the book is so very, very good. show less

I was disappointed in this time travel book. A fan of such great examples of the genre as The Doomsday Book, Passage, Outlander, and, of course, A Connecticut Yankee, I was unimpressed with the lackluster characters in Shortcut. The characters don't seem to learn anything from their travels and remain the same at the end of the book as they were at the beginning. The main character is as willing to dabble at his mediocre art and be supported by a wife, any wife, from beginning to end. None show more of the characters are particularly inspiring. Even Penny, the most likeable character, can't make up her mind whether to pursue her own life or remain a projection of her father's. Ho hum. show less

What the hell kind of ending is that?!

The premise is great. Love the idea of a mysterious way to travel back and forth in time. It was a very slow start. One might say boring.

The main character’s brother and friend are found locked in a container at the bottom of a pool. MC saves his brother and the friend dies. (Not a spoiler. It happens right at the beginning. And, yes, even that was boring.) He knows who did it and just doesn’t say anything. Why?! Why would you let the show more killer/attempted murderer get away with it? Fast forward to present day and he’s just interacting with the killer like nbd. No anger. No bitterness. Bizarre!

After the time travel starts, everyone is really blasé about it. Except the MC’s wife, Flo. Flo gets definitive proof multiple times and refuses to consider it. Everyone else in the town is just kinda like “oh yeah? That’s cool.” Now that I’m thinking of it, the whole book is full of blasé characters acting unrealistically.

And the ending. Just no. show less

This was disappointing, in large part because it's a very good story with a lot of potential, but the writing was far too hack for me to enjoy it very much at all. In fact, I'm so het up it's become a struggle not to include outright spoilers.

It's a time travel book, a small town time travel book (see, doesn't that sound promising?) that reminded me a bit of Jack Finney (who I like a lot). What was killing it for me was the interpersonal stuff. I actively disliked just about every character. show more About 1/3 the way through, I was wondering if this was in fact a novel about the decay of the American family cleverly set up as a genre piece about time travel -- you've got this bratty teenage girl, and her spineless father and bitchy mother have no one to blame but themselves and their crap parenting (or lack of parenting). But no, I think it's really a time travel book that handles the interactions between characters so poorly that it's hard to connect with any of them.

I think the problem here is not so much that the characters are awful, but rather it's that the author had to give them certain behaviors in order to make the plot move forward but couldn't figure out how to do it in a way that didn't make them seem 1. reckless, 2. selfish, and/or 3. stupid.

A minor point, but one which made me crazier as the book went on, was the set up of the geography of the town. It seems like a neat idea - there are these pedestrian shortcuts that run through the town, and naturally, this is where there is potential for time travel. It was weird to me that the author set this up as a unique feature ... most towns don't have them, but if you live in a beach town, chances are they are familiar because they are pedestrian right-of-ways. And in the book, they are called "perp walks" because they are walk ways set perpendicular to the streets ... only the author seems unaware that "perp walks" are already a thing (a different thing) so I kept waiting for the joke about perp walks and it never came.

One of my biggest issues is that there are a lot of "rules" about time travel introduced randomly throughout the book, coincidentally whenever the characters needed to have a "rule" that would determine what happened next. And they are based on nothing, it's not like one of the characters was a mad scientist to spent years inventing a time travel machine (it's not that kind of time travel book), these are ordinary people who, before the events of the book, had never given time travel a thought, and suddenly and haphazardly, they pop off with rules like they know what they're talking about it. show less