The Mindtraveler
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
With more of her life behind her than ahead, Margaret Braverman, a physicist teaching at a small college, cannot help but regret the things she never quite got right. Most important among them was the tragic ending of her romance with her brilliant colleague Frank, something she has never gotten over. And, of course, it would be glorious to get even with that mean-spirited, conceited, womanizing Caleb Winter. After years of experimentation in the back room of her lab, Margaret has finally built a time machine. The key, she discovered, is in teleporting not the body but the mind. And so, at 5:03 p.m. on May 3, 2012, Margaret teleports her mind to her 1987 self. She is able to see and hear but cannot move a muscle. Will she be able to change the future?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rozanski (Banana Kiss) can be forgiven for describing a secret mind-transporting time machine with more comedy than plausibility complete with headgear that fries the heroine's hair when it malfunctions because this novel is not so much science fiction as a musing on nostalgia, stagnancy, and regret. Unfortunately, lonely Garriston University physics professor Margaret Braverman's mismanaged affair with colleague Frank Mermonstein is as shallow and tedious at its beginning in 1987 as it is 25 years later. So are the departmental politics whose players remain unchanged even as the politics of the student world move from South African divestment to the Occupy Movement. Margaret-at-60, riding helplessly in the head of Margaret-at-35, seems to have acquired hindsight but no perspective, so her lack of agency yields her a lot of frustration but very little wisdom. Rozanski squanders the opportunity to say something real about women, aging, and the vast changes in American culture in the last few decades, and instead has written a strangely static story where 2012 is just 1987 with better computers and older waitresses.
