Tress is an ordinary girl with no thirst to see the world. Suspenseful, philosophical, and inventive, this sparkling novel explores the power of memory and love.Ī fantasy adventure with a sometimes-biting wit. Is it too late to change history? Can Joe help Kite and Agatha without changing the future so much that he endangers the toddler daughter he left behind in 1900-or indeed, his own existence? As scenes spiral back and forth between centuries, the book’s emotional center crystallizes around a fundamental mystery: Who, in fact, is Joe? All time-travel plots are fraught with paradox, but not all rise to Pulley’s level of tricky cleverness, and few of those trickily clever books rise to her level of emotional intensity. Missouri Kite, an officer in the Royal Navy, and his sister and ship’s surgeon, Agatha Castlereagh, hope to use information and technology from the future to win the war for the British. There, he passes through a time portal into the middle of the Napoleonic War at a point when victory hangs in the balance-and when previous temporal crossings have already made that balance wobble and spin. A postcard delivered almost a century after it’s mailed sends Joe north to the Outer Hebrides on a quest to learn about his forgotten past and perhaps find Madeline. Joe’s master retrieves him from the hospital-like most people of English descent under the reign of Napoleon IV, Joe is enslaved-and takes him home to Joe’s wife, who is not the same woman as Madeline, the wife Joe believes he remembers. In the time-travel subgenre, of course, there are better explanations than epilepsy for déjà vu (“the sense you’ve seen something new before”) and its opposite, jamais vu (“when something that should be familiar feels wholly alien”). Paramnesia is “the blurring of something imaginary and something real,” explains the doctor, giving what might work equally well as a definition of fiction, particularly of Pulley’s favored fantasy genre. He’s suffering from “silent epilepsy,” a doctor tells him, which is characterized not by the usual convulsions but by symptoms associated with epileptic auras: amnesia, paramnesia, visions. When Joe Tournier steps off a train from Glasgow in Londres in 1898, he can remember his name but very little else. Napoleon conquered England in this time-travel/alt-history fantasy set at the turns of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley