Weighing Shadows
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- USD 15.99
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- USD 15.99
Descripción editorial
A new time-traveling fantasy from National Book Award-winner Lisa Goldstein.
Ann Decker fixes computers for a living, and in the evenings she passes the time sharpening her hacking skills. It's not a very interesting life, but she gets by—until one day she's contacted with a job offer for a company called Transformations Incorporated. None of her coworkers have ever heard of it before, and when Ann is finally told what the company does, she can hardly believe it: TI has invented technology to travel in time.
Soon Ann is visiting a matriarchy in ancient Crete, and then a woman mathematician at the Library of Alexandria. But Transformations Incorporated remains shrouded in mystery, and when Ann finally catches her breath, there are too many troubling questions still unanswered. Who are Transformations Incorporated, and what will they use this technology to gain? What ill effects might going back in time have on the present day? Is it really as harmless as TI says?
When a coworker turns up dead, Ann’s superiors warn her about a covert group called Core out to sabotage the company. Something just isn’t right, but before she has time to investigate, Ann is sent to a castle in the south of France, nearly a thousand years in the past. As the armies of the Crusade arrive to lay siege, and intrigue grows among the viscount’s family, Ann will discover the startling truth—not just about the company that sent her there, but also about her own past.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mythopoeic Award winner Goldstein (The Uncertain Places) stumbles with this poorly-paced time travel action story, which is stuffed with thin, uninteresting characters, predictable twists, and a thoroughly uncompelling narrator. Ann Decker is a high-school dropout who works at a local computer store. She's recruited by a mysterious stranger into a company called Transformations, where she and other people all of whom seem to have very few connections or close friendships learn that time travel really exists, and that agents from a devastated future are travelling back in time to try to fix small mistakes to make the world a better place. After Ann's colleague Gregory dies on a mission to ancient Crete, Ann starts to get hints that there's something wrong with Transformations, and that the company doesn't have a wholesome future in mind as she'd been told. Goldstein's plot is surprisingly neither layered nor original, and Ann offers little for readers to love as a character; her backstory of foster care and poverty is dashed off with little regard to verisimilitude or emotion, which undercuts everything moving forward.